By Walter Mayr, Christian Neef and Jan Puhl
By that time, Moscow was paying little heed to the decisions of its former satellite states. Ironically, it was KGB Chairman Kryuchkov who went to Warsaw in late August to give Moscow's blessing to the Polish Communists' coalition with the opposition. Prime Minister Mazowiecki was a "reliable man," Kryuchkov said, adding: "Everything is good. There is nothing to be concerned about." It was a sentence that would infuriate Romanian President Ceausescu, who (as it was later learned) had requested that the Warsaw Pact intervene in Poland.
The rate at which structures that had seemed cast in stone fell apart in Eastern Europe in 1989 is breathtaking. The key players in Warsaw and Budapest felt like actors in a film. Looking back on those months today, they should be grateful that there was no time to reflect.
In September, the man who had been instrumental in initiating change was overcome by serious doubts over whether the approach he had taken was the right one. Only a few more weeks would pass before Gorbachev would suddenly accuse the Polish communists of having "abandoned the positions of socialism."
The magician was feeling a loss of control over his apprentices. On the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, tens of thousands of people formed a 600-kilometer (375-mile) human chain from Tallinn, Estonia to Vilnius, Lithuania: a symbol of the Baltic states' goal of secession. There were strikes in the coal mines of Ukraine, in Baku Azerbaijani troops prepared for war against Armenia, and in Tbilisi the Georgians took the streets, chanting "Down with the rotten Russian Empire."
A German Confederation?
But now, suddenly, the Kremlin leader was demanding "stability" (as Chernyayev writes: "Stability means stagnation and the end of perestroika!"). He called for a fundamental article on "socialism and its revival" in the theoretical monthly journal of the Communist Party (Chernyayev: "Marxism-Leninism -- that is the 19th century. Gorbachev is losing control over the levers of power in the country. He must decide whether he wants to be the leader of perestroika or the nomenklatura!").
It was at that moment that East Germany also became a problem.
It had hardly played a role at all in Moscow during the first nine months of 1989. The Kremlin had largely tolerated the exodus of East German refugees through Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. And it had been clear to the Kremlin for some time that East Germany could not be held onto in the long run. If Shevardnadze is to be believed, the Soviet leadership had already written off East Germany in 1986. In 1987, Valentin Falin, Moscow's former ambassador to Bonn, said: "The signs of decline in the GDR are more intensive and deeper than was previously assumed." In the spring of 1989, the politburo was presented with a memorandum discussing a confederation of two equal German states
When Gorbachev visited West Germany in June 1989, both sides still believed that the possibility of reunification was "nonsense." Otherwise, however, Gorbachev gave Chancellor Kohl carte blanche, saying: "Do what you can with the GDR."
Hungary's Communists Remove themselves from Power
On the evening of Oct. 7, the Palace of the Republic in downtown East Berlin was as brightly lit as the Titanic was just before it hit the iceberg.
Not far away, crowds surrounding the world time clock on Alexanderplatz chanted "Gorbi" and protested against the fraudulent municipal elections held in East Germany on May 7 -- a vote which triggered initial, tentative anti-regime protests in the DDR. Stasi officers and members of the Free German Youth tried to beat the people into silence.
Meanwhile, officials at the Palace of the Republic, over canapés and petits fours, were expecting the Hungarian delegation at an event to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of East Germany. In the company of Honecker, Gorbachev, Ceausescu and Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov, the inexperienced Bruno Ferenc Straub, chairman of the Hungarian presidential council, seemed like an actor in a fringe event who had lost his way.
On that evening, the key members of the Hungarian Communist Party and government were unavailable to attend the last significant gathering of Warsaw Pact leaders. They had come together in the large convention ballroom at the Budapest Novotel for the 14th convention of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. While Honecker and Gorbachev raised their glasses of champagne in a toast in East Berlin, and while Erich Mielke, the East German minister of state security, left the banquet to restore order in front of the Palace, their Hungarian counterparts were already another step ahead.
At 8:24 on that Saturday evening, they announced in Budapest the radical restructuring of their party, which had controlled the country unopposed for almost 40 years, and its renaming as the "Hungarian Socialist Party." Close to 84 percent of all delegates voted in favor of the unprecedented step the Communists were taking to remove themselves from power.
A Storm on the Wall?
A day earlier, Gorbachev expressed vehement opposition to making the trip to East Germany. He called his loyal assistant Chernyayev twice to assure him that he would not utter a single word of support for Honecker in Berlin.
"We have information that the Wall will be stormed in Gorbachev's presence," Chernyayev noted. The Kremlin was prepared for it to come down. "Soviet troops will not intervene," former Ambassador Falin assured West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper on Sept. 30.
But the Wall did not come down on Oct. 7 -- not yet. Everything else Chernyayev had written in his diary on Oct. 5, however, did come true: "The party convention of the USAP in Budapest will announce the self-dissolution of the socialist Hungarian People's Republic. There is not even any point to discussing Poland. The PVAP is not only no longer in power, but will hardly survive its convention in February. In other words, this is the total dismantling of socialism."
And SED leader Honecker? He protested one last time during Gorbachev's visit. When he was forced to listen, before the assembled politburo in Berlin's Niederschönhausen district, to the Moscow guest's admonitions to finally reform his country, he defiantly rebuked Gorbachev by saying: "Not even salt and matches are to be had in your shops."
"He refuses to concede anything," Egon Krenz, the heir apparent, told Falin at the end of the event. "Perhaps he will have to be replaced at the plenary session on Oct. 10. Or else there will be a storm on the Wall after all."
The German Question
On Oct. 25, Bronislaw Geremek received a visit. East German Ambassador to Poland Jürgen von Zwoll had requested a meeting with Geremek, the head of the opposition group in the Sejm. He wanted to know how the new Warsaw felt about the future of the Germans.
The GDR had always been a guarantor that, "the German question would not pose any dangers for the Polish nation," Geremek said blandly to the ambassador." But, Geremek added, he now saw "integration processes happening between the GDR and West Germany" and, in the future, a "confederation of two German states."
Germany was a sore subject for the Poles, whose government propaganda machine had conjured up the "German threat" for decades. For the government, only a communist Poland allied with the Soviet Union was capable of preventing the Germans from returning to Silesia.
People like Geremek had always rebelled against this view. They never saw German partition as a permanent condition, but as the consequence of the power-sharing agreement the victorious powers had reached at the Yalta Conference in 1945, and as a condition that was to be overcome. Despite the atrocities the Nazis had committed against Poles, the opposition admitted that the Germans deserved "what we claim for ourselves -- the right to our own state."
"It was never discussed at the Round Table," says Aleksander Kwasniewski today. If the negotiators had intended for their reforms to promote German reunification, "it would have been considerably more difficult to come to terms. There were many sitting at the table who had experienced the Nazi occupation."
Two More Years for the Soviet Union
Hungarian Prime Minister Németh experienced the night the Berlin Wall fell in the company of his Spanish counterpart, Felipe Gonzalez. Pozsgay, the man without whose courage everything may have been different, watched the images from Berlin while at home. Both men, Németh and Pozsgay, felt "carried away by enthusiasm" and "overwhelmed," but they also felt confirmed. All barriers in Europe now seemed to have been torn open.
Both men, Németh and Pozsgay, were still unaware that the rapid current of change in the heart of Europe would also sweep them away. Less than 11 months later, on the day of German reunification, they had already become irrelevant on Hungary's political stage.
And what lessons did Gorbachev draw for his own country from the events in Berlin?
None, apparently. In Moscow -- with his endorsement -- the same scenario eerily unfolded on Nov. 7 that Gorbachev had derided in East Berlin only a month earlier.
His country was celebrating the 72nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution -- as if nothing at all had happened between Kaliningrad and Vladivostok in the last few months. There was a parade in the old style, complete with tanks and missiles at the front and the people (under orders) bringing up the rear with flowers and balloons, still chanting slogans in favor of the "Great Socialist October Revolution."
Three kilometers away from Red Square, a counter-demonstration took place, with protestors carrying banners bearing slogans like "72 years on the road to nowhere" and "Proletarians of the world, forgive us!"
It would take another two years before the Soviet Union imploded.
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