Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
Khrushchev or Brezhnev. In any case, Gorbachev was being severely challenged just to hold on to power at home and keep the Soviet Union together. He was now operating within a very different political system, the consequence of the USSR’s first free election since 1917. Having persuaded the Communist Party to abolish the Supreme Soviet and create a functioning parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, in March 1989, he found that this triumph of perestroika created a more independent body that gradually undermined his power. As biographer William Taubman observed, he was ‘replacing the old political “game”, at which he excelled, with a new one that he never really mastered’. In the process new nationalist, even secessionist, energies were set loose as more and more power was devolved to the republics. These centrifugal forces emerged dramatically in Georgia – prompting the intervention of the Red Army in Tbilisi in April, when twenty-one people were killed – and became even more visible as far as Europe was concerned in the Baltic States on the USSR’s western rim.[116]
On 23 August, the day before Mazowiecki was confirmed as Poland’s premier, an estimated 2 million people formed a human chain some 400 miles right across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 that assigned these three Baltic States, independent since 1918, to the Soviet Union. The ‘Baltic Chain’ or ‘Chain of Freedom’ was a graphic reminder that the USSR and the Soviet empire had been held together by force. Both the Polish Assembly and the Polish Communist Party publicly condemned the Pact, as had Gorbachev himself just a few days before. But none of them was, as yet, willing to grapple with the logical implication of their words. The Pact had pulled not only the Baltic States within the USSR but also much of eastern Poland. Denouncing Stalinist policies was therefore not simply a political act; it was another sign that the Soviet bloc’s burgeoning revolution was also opening up buried questions about European geopolitics – questions that affected basic relations between the superpowers.[117]
And so Poland served almost as the icebreaker of the Cold War in the summer of 1989. Hungary followed in its wake, pursuing its own round-table talks for the reform of the electoral process and the governmental structure. In this case, though, the table was not round but triangular – as befitted the more pointed configuration of Hungarian politics in which the key players were the communists, the opposition parties and the non-party organisations. Having started on 13 June, the three groupings reached agreement on 18 September on the transition to a multiparty parliamentary democracy via fully-free national elections. The plan was that, before the elections, a president would be elected by the old, existing parliament – indeed, there was a certain understanding that Imre Pozsgay was the most likely candidate. Yet, as soon as that idea was aired, the Free Democrats, Young Democrats and Independent Trade Unions broke the consensus, refusing to sign the agreement. Quickly Hungary’s triangular politics began to fragment. The opposition parties started to feud among themselves, while on 7 October the Communist Party (in other words, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party) voted to dissolve and then rebrand itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party led by Rezső Nyers. This proved a fatal move, because the public saw through the cosmetic change. Over the following months, in the run-up to the elections, the ‘new-old party’ would fail to grow in membership, unlike its opposition rivals. Meanwhile some communists around Grósz formed, under the old name, their own ‘new-old’ splinter party which was to become even more marginal in Hungarian political life.[118]
These dramatic shifts left Hungarian politics totally up for grabs. On 18 October the parliament went ahead and passed the constitutional amendments agreed by the national round table, not least renaming the country the ‘Hungarian Republic’ – dropping the word ‘People’s’. Free elections were scheduled for 25 March 1990 and the presidential election for the summer. So Hungary had moved to multiparty politics before becoming a democracy. And for longer than in Poland an old – albeit now reform-oriented – government led by the renamed communists would continue to run political affairs. Whereas in Poland, the 4 June elections were the decisive turning point in the exit from communism, the emotional and symbolic roots of Hungary’s renewal as a nation were dramatised on 16 June, with the reburial of Nagy and the renunciation of 1956.
So the Poles were in the vanguard of democratisation. But this was a process that took place within the boundaries of a single state, just as in the Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was in Hungary that Europe’s Iron Curtain would be lifted.
*
August was the continent’s main holiday month. Paris almost closed down. Italians cooled off in the coastal resorts of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. West Germans disappeared to the mountains of Bavaria or to the North Sea coast. In the communist East, sunseekers headed to Bulgaria’s Black Sea beaches or relaxed by the Baltic Sea, while large numbers of East Germans piled into their little, candy-coloured Trabants and drove off to Hungary. The shores of Lake Balaton were a particularly popular destination for those who loved camping. But this year, many campers were planning a one-way trip, having read or seen news reports about the end of Hungary’s barbed-wire border. They glimpsed the chance of slipping into the West. As historian Mary Sarotte has pointed out, the East German secret police, the Stasi, wrote up a ‘surprisingly honest internal summary’ of their citizens’ motives for wanting out of the GDR: lack of consumer goods, inadequate services, poor medical care, limited opportunities for travel, bad workplace conditions, the relentlessly bureaucratic attitude of the state, and the lack of a free media.[119]
Material reasons aside, there was another more political cause for flight. Inspired by the amazing political transformations in Poland and Hungary – countries they knew well and had visited in their hundreds of thousands – many East Germans saw Honecker, by contrast, as an immovable obstacle to progress in their own country. He was ‘giving yesterday’s answers to today’s questions’. Resentment first broke into the open in May when local elections, which many East Germans hoped would be held in the spirit of the USSR’s democratisation, had in fact been as tightly controlled as ever by the party. At the polling station everyone was merely expected to approve the list of candidates put forward by the ruling party. There was no opposition and no choice – other than rejecting candidates, which many did. Those who ‘forgot’ to vote were promptly visited with a helpful reminder from the Stasi. When on election night, 7 May 1989, the results were announced, 98.85% had voted for the official lists. Everything was ‘in order’: that’s at least what state election director Egon Krenz proclaimed.[120]
The election was a travesty and the result obviously bore no relation to the real mood of GDR citizens. They felt conned by this charade of democracy. One of the few protest posters read sarcastically ‘Always on board for election fraud’ (Nie genug vom Wahlbetrug). It was as if East Germans were being treated as children in a playpen, whereas the Poles and Hungarians were allowed to behave like adults – free to voice independent political views and help shape political change for themselves. ‘Many people can no longer tolerate the kindergarten atmosphere, or being constantly led by the nose on all fronts,’ said Reinhard Schult, a leading East German activist. ‘People are leaving East Germany because they have lost all hope of change.’[121] In 1988 a total of 29,000 people from the GDR had legally exited west. In just the first six months of 1989, 37,000 had been granted permission to do so.[122]
Economic prospects and political despair were the ‘push’ factors. On the ‘pull’ side, Hungary’s increasingly porous border with Austria was obviously significant. Yet that in itself was not sufficient because, if people got caught ‘preparing’ or ‘trying’ to run away illegally, the Hungarian authorities were obliged to send them back to the GDR under a secret protocol to a 1969 bilateral treaty. But on 12 June 1989 there was a new legal twist when the Hungarian government started to adhere to the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on Refugees – honouring a commitment it had made in March. This striking substitution of political principles suggested that Hungary might no longer force East Germans back to the GDR: to borrow