The Year that Changed the World Read online

  Precisely what Grosz and other hard-liners intended is not clear, even now, but it appears to have involved the threat of force—perhaps by strong-arm miners, traditional government allies, coupled with Hungary’s riot police and workers’ militias. Nemeth, at least, did not mistake the message. “From that point on, we knew,” he told me. “It was them or us.” By early January, these concerns had grown to the point that the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors each paid highly publicized visits to Grosz and senior Hungarian security officials to warn them against the “likely consequences” of violence, according to Rudolf Tokes in his definitive history, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution. These plots came to naught, Tokes believes, because the interior minister of the time, Istvan Horvath, threatened to expose them. Yet it was a clear sign of the risks that Nemeth and his fledgling government were running, and a measure of the schism that split the Hungarian leadership. As Tokes puts it, the party’s “fundamentalist hard core” was composed of “desperate and dangerous people who, if given the chance, might have turned the clock back.”

  What stayed their hand? In a word, uncertainty. At this delicate moment, no one had an answer to the ultimate question: what would Moscow do? In late December, Gorbachev delivered a speech to the United Nations, announcing that by the end of the following year the Soviet Union would unilaterally withdraw a quarter million men and some ten thousand tanks, artillery and aircraft from Eastern Europe. He aimed to spark a breakthrough on stalled talks with the United States on reducing conventional forces in Europe and in doing so dropped this nugget: “It is obvious that the use or threat of force cannot be an instrument of foreign policy.”

  Many in the West, particularly, saw this as an implicit renunciation of the infamous Brezhnev doctrine justifying Soviet intervention in such cases as the 1968 Prague Spring. The problem was that, in typical Soviet fashion, Gorbachev did not say it directly. The leaders of Eastern Europe were left to interpret his remarks, to figure it out on their own. On the one hand, these communist regimes possessed ample power to crack down, if they chose. On the other, they expected Gorbachev to change his tune and come riding to the rescue if faced with a bona fide anticommunist revolution, as Charles Gati notes in The Bloc That Failed. Amid the confusion and uncertainty, they waited.

  Across the Atlantic, America also waited, all but oblivious to the drama beginning to take shape in Europe. It had been a distracting year, full of revolutionary developments. For the first time ever, in 1988, music CDs outsold vinyl. Prozac was introduced as an antidepressant. At the summer Olympics in Seoul, gold medal sprinter Ben Johnson was caught using steroids after setting a world record in the 100-meter dash. Robin Givens filed for divorce from boxer Mike Tyson. The Reverend Jimmy Swaggart was exposed as having a liking for prostitutes. Soviet forces began to withdraw from Afghanistan. In the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, a bomb allegedly planted by Libyan terrorists exploded aboard Pan Am flight 103, killing 271 people from twenty-one countries and setting the stage for U.S. military retaliation.

  Most important, a new president had just been elected. George H. W. Bush, vice president under Ronald Reagan, defeated Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in a campaign distinguished less by the quality of its debate over foreign policy and U.S.-Soviet relations than by silly photographs of the Democratic candidate riding ill at ease in an M1 Abrams tank and a flap over the furlough of a convicted-killer-turned-rapist named Willie Horton. As happens every four years, all but the most pressing issues got lost in the consuming obsession with gaining the White House.

  As the new administration planned its transition, attention turned first to filling jobs, and only secondly to policy. If the incoming team might logically have been expected to build on the momentum of their predecessors in the Reagan administration, particularly in relations with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet bloc, it was not to be. The newly designated secretary of state, James Baker, made that crystal clear. “There was a deliberate pause when President Bush succeeded President Reagan—in all foreign policy, not just matters involving the United States and the Soviet Union,” he told CNN. “We had a new team,” he added, including a new national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and his deputy, Condoleezza Rice. These “new players” were determined to put their “own stamp” on foreign policy, said Baker. In fact, he expected the “real action” to be in Asia, according to an aide, rather than “old hat” Europe where nothing much would change.

  The president-elect did not even try to conceal his skepticism about Gorbachev. Reagan had introduced them during the final days of his presidency. “I know what people are telling you now that you have won the election,” Gorbachev told the new U.S. leader over lunch on Governors Island. “You’ve got to go slow, you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to review. That you can’t trust us, that we’re doing all this for show.” But he was not doing this for show, the Russian leader told Bush, looking him square in the eye. “You’ll see soon enough. I’m not going to undermine you or surprise you or take advantage of you. I’m doing this because I need to. I’m doing this because there’s a revolution taking place in my country. I started it. And they all applauded me in 1986 when I did it and now they don’t like it so much. But it’s going to be a revolution nonetheless.” Yet that is exactly what Bush did: go slow, review. Like Scowcroft, in particular, he did not trust the Soviet leader the way Reagan had come to. “Everyone looked favorably on glasnost and perestroika,” Bush said years later in an interview with CNN, “but I thought it was prudent to take some time to reevaluate the situation.”

  Incredibly, this “pause” would become a freeze lasting nearly six months through what would prove to be some of the most dramatic developments in the twentieth century.

  As 1989 began, then, Miklos Nemeth and his fellow revolutionaries quietly went about their business, largely alone, unnoticed and without allies in what would be a bitter and potentially fatal struggle for power. Nemeth was under no illusions about the depth of Hungary’s crisis, nor why he had been tapped as prime minister. He was being set up. He was to be the communists’ fall guy, the man whom the people would blame when the economy completely crumbled.

  Grosz and other party leaders feared they could not arrest Hungary’s economic slide—30 percent inflation, the highest per capita foreign debt in Europe, falling living standards and wages. Few Hungarian families could make ends meet without working two or even three jobs. Resentment was growing. So that May, at a fractious party conference, they looked around for a potential scapegoat to become prime minister. Nemeth, then head of the party economics department, was their choice. “I was the innocuous compromise candidate,” he would tell me years later, recounting the story of his surprising rise and expected fall—a man who could be counted on to make no waves. Let Nemeth try these “reforms,” their thinking went. “If he fails, we can blame him. As for me, I would be kicked out and painted as a young and energetic expert—who failed. Politically, I would be dead.”

  Nemeth figured he had six months. Every move he made during this time had a single objective: to loosen the grip of the party on his government. “Nothing was more important.” Without breaking free of the party, he could not push economic reform. Without promoting democracy and a more pluralist society, he could not break free of the party. And so it was. Those exciting conversations with Nemeth and Kulcsar, the talk of democracy and a bill of rights inspired by Madison and Jefferson: it was perfectly genuine, but it was also realpolitik—a means to an end in a brutal tug-of-war for power. How this battle was fought, in coming months, would decide the future of communism in Hungary and set the stage, by late summer, for more dramatic events—the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe.

  I wasn’t conscious of any of this at the time I flew back to Bonn, the sleepy city on the Rhine that was then Germany’s capital, where I lived with my young family. More subliminally, though, I wonder. Just before New Year’s, I did a late-night radio show s
omewhere in the United States, one of those midnight-to-dawn broadcasts where time stands still and the audience is anyone driving long distances through the darkness. We talked for nearly two hours: what was happening in Moscow, in Eastern Europe, what the new year might bring. I spoke about Hungary, the nobility of what I saw, my own feelings of a deep upwelling promise, how something was in the air in the East that we in the West hadn’t yet sensed. Maybe it was the transport of the moment. Perhaps it was living for the first time in such a haunted land as Germany. The Rhine flowed past our house in the silent darkness, history entered in. I went so far as to say that the Wall might soon come down, possibly by next Christmas!

  Was it a moment of clarity and insight, or a fantasy that somehow came to pass? Whatever, even I did not believe it in the morning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Miraculous Conversion

  General Wojciech Jaruzelski was famous for his dark sunglasses and ramrod-stiff bearing. He was the infamous Polish strongman who declared martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981. He had crushed the Solidarity trade union, rising up in the summer of 1980 to challenge communist rule, and jailed its leaders. Yet in the early winter of 1989, he correctly sensed the change in political climate and knew what to do.

  Like Hungary, Poland was in crisis. Like Hungary, it was chiefly economic. And like Hungary, this crisis was largely invisible, borne quietly by the people but nonetheless fissile, an explosion waiting to happen. Just as Hungary’s communists sought to shift blame for the country’s problems to someone else—Miklos Nemeth and his reformist government—so did Poland’s rulers. In extremis, they took a bold and unprecedented step. They decided to make common cause with their mortal enemy, Solidarity. The man who led them to do so, whose brainchild it was, would be none other than the Polish Antichrist, the poster boy of communist oppression, at least as seen in the West, Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski.

  What demons swirled in that poor man’s head. What a Shakespearean psychodrama consumed him. It was as if the past were repeating itself, returning to haunt him. He could choose his role: Hamlet or Lear. Whether one or the other, he almost certainly sensed, his personal destiny would not end well.

  That spring, strikes had broken out in the coal fields of southern Poland. They continued sporadically but with growing fervor through the summer. To the consternation of the government, protesting workers called for a return of Solidarity, banned since the imposition of martial law seven years before. Solidarnosc had always drawn its strength from the nation’s rough-and-tumble miners, steelworkers and machinists. Here, once again, they were marching and chanting a slogan from yore that sent shivers through the regime: “There is no liberty without Solidarity!” Jaruzelski clearly heard the echo. Wage freezes and government price hikes had triggered the latest unrest, but he knew it reflected the deeper and more generalized anger of economic desperation. He knew, too, that it presented him with a choice, almost identical to one he had to make so many years before—the choice that had tormented him and cast him as a traitor. As leader of the nation, head of the communist party, should he act to preserve an increasingly untenable status quo, most likely requiring force? Or should he try something new?

  In 1981, Jaruzelski’s choice had been force. He justified the decision as a lesser evil. It was either impose martial law and restore order on Russia’s border or risk a Soviet invasion and occupation. To his mind, he was a patriot who had done what he had to do to save his country. How could his countrymen, even the world, not understand? Bidding those who would judge him to put themselves in his shoes, he described the world as he saw it. Solidarity was about to call a general strike. The economy was on its knees. Civil unrest threatened. “Emotions were explosive and spiraling,” he would explain in later years. “The petrol had been spilled.”

  He did not seem a man reconciled to his decision. In 1982, when U.S. defense secretary Caspar Weinberger branded him “a Russian in Polish uniform,” Jaruzelski lashed out irrationally. He announced that Poland would impose “sanctions” on the United States. Cultural ties were terminated and American scholars sent home. Never mind that Poland, notwithstanding two years of U.S. sanctions, was economically afloat only thanks to Western loans and trade credits. Yet Weinberger had it right. More than any other East European leader, Jaruzelski owed his existence to Moscow. When the Soviets organized Polish units during World War II, he enlisted. He fought with the Russians in Berlin. He became a spy for the Kremlin within the Polish military as early as 1946, helping to suppress anticommunist insurgents in southern Poland. In 1968, after becoming defense minister, he was heavily involved in an anti-Semitic “cleansing” of the Polish army. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the most freethinking and reform-minded of Poland’s military were Jewish.) He led the Polish contingent that put down Prague Spring in 1968. In 1970, he helped organize the execution of striking workers during an uprising in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin. And named communist party secretary and prime minister in early 1981, he essentially declared war on his own nation.

  Translated literally, that declaration of martial law—stan wojenny—meant “state of war.” Critics scoff at the notion that Jaruzelski acted to avoid a Soviet invasion. Documents released from Kremlin archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they say, suggest the Soviets had no intention of invading and that Jaruzelski acted to preserve the communist party and its power, pure and simple. And yet, was it really so simple? As Jaruzelski later recounted it, his was a “devil’s choice.” He was torn between the “anvil” of internal conflict, arising from the challenge of Solidarity, and the “hammer” of Russian intervention. “I spent weeks prior to taking the decision on martial law as in some horrible nightmare. I entertained thoughts of suicide.” What tipped him to use force, he explained, were the unmistakable signals from Moscow. Under the pretext of holding maneuvers, they had stationed twenty divisions of the Red Army on Poland’s eastern border. Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian leader, telephoned Jaruzelski repeatedly, urging him to “take the decisive measures you intend to use against the counterrevolution”—almost precisely the same message, in tone, that Moscow had delivered to Alexander Dubcek in 1968, prior to the invasion that ended Prague Spring. And so, Jaruzelski acted.

  By 1989, however, circumstances were very different. There was no external threat, real or imagined. Meeting in Moscow in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev had told Jaruzelski that, henceforth, Poland’s problems were its own to solve. Then came the Soviet leader’s speech to the UN, in December 1988, and his implicit repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Others might have doubted his sincerity, but not Jaruzelski. He knew the Russians. After all, he was their man. The handwriting was on the wall. Instantly, he knew that it was time to deal.

  With the same decisiveness he displayed in crushing Solidarity in 1981, he this time embraced it. In late August, even as the miners’ strike was petering out in the face of public apathy, Jaruzelski announced a “brave turnaround.” From now on, Solidarity would be a part of Poland’s future. Talks would begin to determine its proper role in helping to solve the nation’s problems, particularly economic. A “Round Table,” he called it. Though stopping short of proposing that the trade union be officially resurrected—and legally recognized—Jaruzelski suggested something that would soon prove far more dramatic. Taking a leaf from Hungary, he floated the possibility of allowing “opposition groups,” such as Solidarity, to participate for the first time in parliamentary elections that spring, just a few months away. Perhaps, he intimated generously, an opposition leader would even be allowed to join the government.

  The communist party rank and file were shocked. Yet Jaruzelski paid little heed. He was all steel and iron resolve, as determined on his present course as he was in his last, in the black days of 1981. Stand with me in charting a new course for Poland, one that acknowledges Solidarity, he told party leaders at a confrontational meeting of the ruling Central Committee in January, or he would resign. Though few recognized it, inside the country or w
ithout, Poland at that moment passed a tipping point—Jaruzelski’s unwittingly radical “brave turnaround.” He could have played Lear and drenched himself and his nation in blood once again. But this time, as he himself later described it, he chose Hamlet.

  True to the role, he was a study in ambiguity. He both acted, decisively, and held back. He was visionary—and blind. He was torn between his own past and his country’s future, between a dubious morality and just action. He almost certainly did not foresee where his course would lead and seemed driven as much by intuition (if not hope) as by political calculation. Confiding in almost no one, he was unknown. Was he motivated chiefly by expedience, once again doing what needed to be done to preserve socialism and the party’s prerogatives, as critics presupposed? Or was it something deeper and more subliminal, a banishing of ghosts, whereby Jaruzelski, ashamed of his choice nearly eight years earlier, was now determined to make amends, to act justly and accept the consequences—to let the cards fall as they may? The answer may be too buried within Jaruzelski’s psyche for even him to know.