The walls came tumbling down: collapse and rebirth in Eastern Europe 9780199732630

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
MAPS (page ix)
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (page xi)
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
Chapter One The New Opposition: Antipolitics and Solidarity (page 15)
Chapter Two The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis (page 57)
Chapter Three The Momentum of Change in Hungary (page 95)
Chapter Four Solidarity: The Return of the Repressed in Poland (page 123)
Chapter Five The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 (page 157)
Chapter Six The Devil's Finger: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia (page 203)
Chapter Seven The New European Order (page 243)
Chapter Eight Central Europe on the Move (page 269)
Chapter Nine Southeastern Europe: A Glass Half Empty (page 306)
EPILOGUE: Pluralism, the New Reality (page 343)
INDEX (page 351)

Citation preview

The Walls Came Tumbling Down 7 ae

This page intentionally left blank

The Walls Came Tumbling Down Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe

—_, GALE STOKES

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town DaresSalaam HongKong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2012, 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. For titles covered by Section 112 of the US Higher Education Opportunity Act, please visit www.oup.com/us/he for the latest information about pricing and alternate formats. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016

http://www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stokes, Gale, 1933-

The walls came tumbling down: collapse and rebirth in Eastern Europe / Gale Stokes. — 2nd ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-973263-0 (alk. paper)

1. Europe, Eastern—History—1945- I. Title. DJK50.s75 2012

947.0009'048—dc22 2011016415 Printing number:9 8 76 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

To my mother Ida Jane Bassett Stokes (1898-1988)

In belated but heartfelt thanks for her loving support

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

aT,

MAPS 1X PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Xi

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION Xiil

Introduction 1 ChapterOne |The New Opposition: Antipolitics and

Solidarity 15 Chapter Two The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 57 Chapter Three The Momentum of Change in Hungary 95 Chapter Four Solidarity: The Return of the Repressed in Poland 123

Chapter Five The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 157 Chapter Six | The Devil’s Finger: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia 203 Chapter Seven The New European Order 243

vil

villi CONTENTS

Chapter Eight Central Europe on the Move 269 Chapter Nine Southeastern Europe: A Glass Half

Empty 306 EPILOGUE: Pluralism, the New Reality 343

INDEX 351

MAPS

a,

Map1_ Eastern Europe 1988 12 Map2_ Eastern Europe 1993 13

Map3 Western Balkans 2010 14

1x

This page intentionally left blank

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

a,

‘he book is an updated version of The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The

Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, published by Oxford University Press in 1993. It contains six revised chapters from that book, plus a new conclusion and an additional three chapters covering the post-Communist period. The chapter from the first edition entitled “1990 and 1991: The First Two Years of a

Long Time” has been dropped from this edition, but could still provide some value for those particularly interested in those years. The term Eastern Europe is used in this book to refer to five countries in East Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia), the German Democratic Republic, and the nine countries of Southeast Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania). The printed notes of the approximately 80 interviews I conducted in the region early in 1992 are available for inspection in the Woodson Research Center at Rice University. Unfortunately, to check the page number citations to Keesing’s Record of World Events, or its predecessor (referred to here as simply Keesing’s), it is necessary to refer to the printed version, since the online version is not searchable by page. I wrote the first edition of this book over a two-year period, during which I was fortunate enough to have an extended leave from Rice. I also finished this version over a more leisurely two-year period, this time as an emeritus professor, where one comes to work late, goes home early, and sometimes doesn't come at all. Once again, however, I am pleased to be able to thank Rice University and three chairs of its History Department (Carl Caldwell, Marty Wiener, and Lora Wildenthal) for providing me with office space, library privileges, and other amenities, without which I would not have been able to complete the task. I thank Hajime Kumahata

and Becky Leven for scanning the first edition into Word for me. At Oxford University Press, Nancy Lane was the original supporter of this book, but Brian Wheel is the one who approached me with a request to do the revision. Charles Cavaliere and David Wharton have been understanding editors. Through Brian's

XI

xll1 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

intervention, I was able to attend the conference in Poland entitled “Recovering Forgotten History: The Image of East Central European American Textbooks,” where the comments of Andrzej S. Kaminski, Barbara Pendzich, Daria Nalecz, and especially Chris Lazarski were of enormous use. In addition, I would like to thank Norman Naimark, Sabrina Ramet, and Anna Grzymata-Busse for their comments on certain chapters. I would also like to thank the following reviewers for their comments on the first edition: Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University; Irina Gigova, College of Charleston; Eagle Glassheim, University of British Columbia; T. Mills Kelly, George Mason University; Conor O’Dwyer, University of Florida; Cristofer Scarboro, Kings College. Needless to say, any errors of fact or interpretation remain my responsibility. Finally, let me apologize to the many friends and colleagues who will not find their work, or maybe their favorite work, cited in this book. The literature is enormous, and I have benefited from much of it that does not appear in the notes. Thank you all. This book is dedicated to my mother, whom I did not adequately acknowledge during her lifetime. She sponsored my first trip to Yugoslavia that sparked my interest in the region and set me on the career path that has occupied most of my life. She also helped me and Roberta when we needed it most. She was an able woman. Roberta has been there since the beginning too. She enthusiastically returned with me to graduate school with few prospects and two small children; cheerfully enjoyed a lengthy stay in the former Yugoslavia with the still small children; and established a creative life for us both in Houston. I ended the preface to the first edition by saying how lucky I was to have such a life partner. I still am.

New to this Edition — Updated to incorporate recent events and new scholarship, featuring three new chapters (chapter 7, chapter 8, and chapter 9) and a new Epilogue. — Additional analysis on the admission of East European countries into the EU. — Increased emphasis on the human dimension of East European history since 1989.

Houston G.S. — New coverage of how the socialist past is remembered in the region.

November, 2010

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

aT,

Th term Eastern Europe as used in this book refers to the five countries of east central Europe and of southeastern Europe that were formerly part of the Soviet block, plus the German Democratic Republic and Yugoslavia. Albania is not discussed. The book is based in part on interviews conducted with a number of persons who experienced the events of the past twenty years. A few interviews were conducted in the United States, but most were done in Eastern Europe early in 1992. During these interviews, which usually lasted from one to two hours, I took notes by hand. Within a few hours of each interview I transcribed the handwritten notes into by notebook computer, and when I returned to the United States I printed them out. When a citation in the text is made to “interview,” with no further identification, it refers to one of these interviews, the printed notes of which are in my possession.

The abbreviation RFE refers to the various publications of Radio Free Europe, such as a Situation Report (SR). JPRS refers to the publications of the Joint Publication Service. FBIS refers to the daily reports published by the Federal Broadcast Information Service. Materials cited from all three of these extremely useful sources can be located by the data given in the footnotes referring to them.

Abbreviations for organizations and their original titles can be found in the index.

The book was written over a two-year period. I spent the first year (19901991) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where access to the Library of Congress and contact with many knowledgeable scholars were of enormous help to me. I would especially like to thank John Lampe, director of the East European Program of the Center, for his professional and particularly for his personal counsel; Sam Wells for assigning me such a nice office; and Dean Anderson for being such a good listener. The second year (1991-1992) was made possible by a grant from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, which permitted me to spend five months as a guest of the Institute for Sino-Soviet Studies of George Washington University (now the Institute for Xill

xiv PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies). I do not think I could have completed this book in its final form without access to this organization’s unparalleled collection of materials, which is unusually accessible to scholars. In particular, I would like to thank James R. Millar, director of the institute, for being such an accommodating and friendly host. During the last six months of the two-year period, Allen J. Matusow, dean of humanities at Rice University, provided me with relief from my teaching duties. I would like to thank both him and the university for the extremely generous way they have supported this project. My grant form the National Council also provided the funds with which I took a seventeen-week trip through all six countries discussed in this book during February and March 1992. The impressions and interviews that this trip provided were very important in shaping the final version. Naturally, errors and infelicities remain my responsibility. I would appreciate hearing from readers who notice factual errors. During the course of working on this book various assistants have provided valuable aid in finding materials, photocopying, and the like, and I would like to thank them very much for their invaluable help. They are Zlatko Kovac, Susan Lusi, and Mark Teel. At Rice University I would like to thank Cathy Monholland, whose meticulous editing saved me many and varied errors. I am also grateful to Nancy Lane of Oxford University Press for having confidence in this project. It is not possible to thank all of the approximately eighty persons who were kind enough to meet with me on my trip through Eastern Europe, but I would

like to give special thanks to my main hosts in several cities: Jiti Zlatuska in Brno; Miroslav Hroch in Prague; Wlodek Weselowski in Warsaw; Maria Kovacs in Budapest; Kurt Treptow in Cluj; Mihai Ionescu and Harry Bucur in Bucharest; Ivanka Nedeva and Ivan IIlchev in Sofia; Miodrag Perisi¢, Andrej Mitrovi¢c, and Ljubinka Trgovcevic in Belgrade; and Vid Pecjak in Ljubljana. I thank you all, and I hope to see each of you again soon. At many points in the writing of this book my wife Roberta also might have said, “I hope to see you again soon,’ since we spent five months apart while I was at George Washington and two more apart while I was traveling in Eastern Europe. I do not think either of us liked this much, but at least I had my project to keep me company. I have been blessed by her love and her understanding many times and in many ways, and the period over which this book was written was not the least of those. Some things in life we can choose, others are blind luck. Finding Roberta, or somehow being in the right place to be found some thirtyfive years ago, was certainly the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

Houston G.S. February 1993

The Walls Came Tumbling Down 7 ae

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Mc students today look back on the two mass movements of the twentieth

century, fascism and communism, with the same sort of incomprehension that students of earlier generations looked back on the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How was it possible that two movements whose claims seem so implausible, almost even comical—only a few months after the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe the main reaction of visitors viewing historical displays from the communist era was laughter!—should have not only attracted millions of enthusiastic followers but, on the basis of what their adherents considered high principle, sent millions of people to anguished deaths? Attuned to a world in which diversity is not only the order of the day but the only respectable theoretical position, students need substantial imaginative powers to recreate the mindset in which claims to absolute truth justified dictators in dominating not only their neighbors but their own people as well.? Young people need to make this imaginative effort in good measure because of events that took place in Eastern Europe in 1989, when suddenly and—all hindsight to the contrary—quite unexpectedly the hitherto subjugated and supposedly passive peoples of Eastern Europe appeared in the streets and threw off the hollow regimes that had ruled them for forty years. In the space of a few months the nations of Eastern Europe, which for two generations had been considered simply adjuncts of Soviet Russia—a bloc of subservient satellites tied by iron apron strings to the motherland of revolution—showed themselves to be full participants in the drama of European transformation, or at least expectant participants. Economically devastated by forty years of mismanagement, the East Europeans proved to be considerably less politically devastated by forty years of living a lie. Within a few months most of the East European countries established new, non-Communist governments that superficially looked a good deal like democratic systems elsewhere in Europe, began or promised economic reforms, and repudiated the Communist ideology that had seemed all powerful only one or two years earlier. How could this have happened with such speed and

1

2 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

thoroughness that the old regimes already have receded into the mists of a futile and lost past? And how have these newly invigorated peoples and states fared, once turned loose on their own?

The first few chapters of the book concentrate on the decay of communism since 1968, the emergence of opposition movements in Central Europe, and the thrilling collapse of 1989. Chapter seven sets the stage for post-Communist developments by outlining the new European order that emerged after 1989. Germany, split into capitalist and socialist halves at the end of World War

II, united into Europe’s strongest country, but within the limiting confines of the European Union and NATO. At the same time the Soviet Union collapsed. Suddenly, instead of confronting hostile powers motivated by antirationalism or hyperrationalism, Eastern Europe found itself aspiring to enter the relatively benign embrace of the European Union. Chapters eight and nine show how this new situation led to the creation of democracies and functioning market economies in Central Europe and in the Eastern Balkans, but to continued distress and unrest in the Western Balkans. A separate chapter is devoted to the harrowing dissolution of Yugoslavia. The historical setting in which the decline of “real existing socialism,” as East European communism styled itself in the 1980s, took place is a very broad one. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a significant milestone in the history of the transformations human societies have undergone over the past few hundred years. Even though this process has no universally accepted name—the industrial revolution, the great transformation, and the energy revolution, among others, have been proposed—it is clear that something quite remarkable has occurred. Devices that convert chemical energy into useful work through electricity and internal combustion engines dominate the daily life of the industrialized world. Information systems, beginning with printing by movable type, moving on to the newspaper, the telegraph, radio and television, and today characterized by wireless digital devices, have the capacity to place enormous amounts of information more or less instantly into the hands of billions of people. Transportation systems, limited two hundred years ago to the speed of the horse, now routinely move large numbers of people and goods at high speeds hundreds, even thousands, of miles in a single day. In the industrialized world most human beings no longer live in rural areas as they did for ten thousand years after the invention of agriculture but in huge urban agglomerations, often covered with foul-smelling air. Gender relations, family linkages, work habits, ways of dying, care of the sick—in short, every aspect of life—has changed, often dramatically, in the last few hundred years. These entirely new social and economic conditions made the political structures societies had found useful for hundreds or even thousands of years obsolete. In the twentieth century, for example, kings, for tens of generations the vital linchpins of European societies, became merely sentimental icons of national tradition, figures out of living wax museums, while the proud title “emperor” dropped almost completely out of use, retaining nothing of its grandeur except the musty odor of a distant past. Since about the eighteenth century first Western societies

Introduction 3

and then societies throughout the world have had to find new political mechanisms to cope with new situations. In the twentieth century Europeans tried three large-scale experiments using new forms of political and economic organization in their efforts to meet the challenge of the great transformation. I call these three experiments, all first broached in the eighteenth century, the antirational, the hyperrational, and the pluralist genres of political and economic organization. By calling the fascist and Nazi experiments of the period between the two world wars antirationalist I mean to suggest that the leaders of these movements of rage and rejection craved the technological power put into their hands by the industrial revolution, but at the same time disavowed the rationalizing intellectual and social concomitants of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. As Joseph Goebbels put it in 1933, “The year 1789 is hereby eradicated from history. 3 The Nazis believed, as Schelling did, that the universe held “a primal, nonrational force that can be grasped only by the intuitive power of men of imaginative genius.”4 Nazism and fascism rejected reason for power, individuality for sacro egoismo, virtue for vainglory, transparency for obscurantism, constitutions for the Fiihrerprinzip, humanitarianism for racial fanaticism, objectivity for prej-

udice, and, in the end, the guillotine for the gas chamber. The horrible end of Nazism in the holocaust of World War II clearly demonstrated the bankruptcy of the antirational experiment. I call the second major twentieth-century effort to organize the great trans-

formation hyperrational not because the policies of Communist states were instrumentally suited to their goal of liberating mankind, because they were not, and not because the effort was rational in the economic sense, because the centrally planned economies were economically irrational, but because Communists

based their pretensions to power on their claim that they could transform the world through understanding it rationally through Marxism. If the Nazis rejected reason in favor of blood, the Communists elevated Descartes’ assertion that through reason we humans could “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature” to a transcendent law of society that justified an authoritarian regime.5 “Marxism is not a philosophy of history,’ the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, “it is the philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history.’°° Communist leaders believed they had a right to direct all aspects of society because they had a correct, or “scientific,” understanding of the laws of human development, which they were putting to use to conquer nature and to create a truly human society. If 1945 proved the antirationalist genre of solutions inadequate to the twentieth century, 1989 was the year that the hyperrationalist genre proved wanting as well.’ Both antirationalism and hyperrationalism are based on the premise that those who have control of the state have the right and even the duty to impose their views on society, no matter what the cost. In the early years of the cold war, both styles were called “totalitarian” because they aspired to total control of all social interactions. It was demonstrated later that they were much less crisply organized than it seemed at the time. Nevertheless, their common idea was that

4 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the job of the state is to use its power to implement the rulers’ intentions. The third genre of solutions, which I call pluralism, was based on an entirely different idea.’ The underlying notion of political pluralism is that there are many valid ways to live a full and complete life, and the state should not impose any one of them on its citizens. For pluralists, the unique power of the state should not be used to implement an ideology that puts one good above all others, but rather should be limited precisely to prevent such an outcome. Constitutional structures should make it impossible for any particular element of the body politic to gain unlimited control of the state’s ability to impose its values. I use the term pluralism rather than democracy, liberal government, limited government, or some similar term because of the many ways that it can be achieved.’ There is no single blueprint of pluralist solutions. Unlike Soviet state socialism, pluralism does not claim to be a system and does not aim toward any utopian end point. Instead it is a process characterized in Europe and North America by representative democracy, a politics of accommodation in which, ideally, interests contend openly in the public sphere, political parties that compete in contested elections, government that is responsible in some way to the people, an electorate that takes in all adults, and legal protection of human and civil rights. These principles reflect the insight that for long-term stability in a rapidly changing world political structures must be constructed to encompass human frailties rather than to eradicate them. The most dynamic sphere in which pluralist political structures have permitted process to occur is the economic. Underlying the flexible nature of pluralist economies is a confidence that in the end market mechanisms are the best regulators of production and distribution. But only in the end. Pluralism does not mean unregulated markets but understands, as Adam Smith did, that a strong state is needed to prevent monopoly, maintain a stable currency, enforce contracts, and

uphold standards of health and welfare. Within that general rubric the variety of mixed economies is enormous: French indicative planning and ownership of large enterprises, Swedish socialism, German codetermination, American mixed economy, and Japanese cooperative structures. Unlike fascism and communism, pluralism has the flexibility to encompass change. Its first great test was its survival and subsequent prospering following the two world wars, and the second came in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when pluralist systems were able to change and grow despite (perhaps because of) the information revolution. The multiplication of electronic devices, created by the inventions and financial success of tens of thousands of innovators, completely revitalized the way business and even personal life was conducted but did not threaten the stability of any pluralist society. During that same period the more rigid communist system proved almost laughably unable to cope with electronic change. Of the three main twentieth-century genres of political and economic experimentation, therefore, only pluralism proved minimally adequate to the century's

social and technological challenges. This success was not an unmixed or freestanding triumph. Globalization, global warming, water and energy issues, post-

Introduction 5

colonial resentments, nuclear proliferation, and population pressures will test every regime in the coming century, pluralist or not. But the pluralist genre was far less costly in human suffering than the other two genres, each of which contributed tens of millions of violent deaths to the slaughter bench of history. This does not mean that no one will ever propose a fascist solution or a Communist one again. Xenophobic and racist political parties have resurfaced across the con-

tinent; Alexander Lukashenko rules over a Soviet style system in Belarus; and Hugo Chavez prospers in Venezuela. But it does mean that fascism and communism will never be able to generate the enthusiastic hopefulness among broad strata of society that was their hallmark at the peak of their twentieth-century successes. The great message of the twentieth century is not positive but negative: we have not learned what works so much as what does not work. But at least pluralism can still look forward. The failures of 1945 and 1989 mean that from now on the other two genres will always be backward-looking dead ends. Eastern Europe constitutes a unique field on which all three of the twentieth century political genres were tried. Given the faulty international settlements of

World War I, strong feelings of national pride, a worldwide economic depression, and the emergence of Nazi Germany, it is no wonder that the first approximations of pluralist systems in these countries wilted in the 1930s, with only Czechoslovakia able to preserve some measure of democratic rule until Hitler partitioned it in 1939. Buffeted by powerful forces outside of their control, some East European intellectuals in the 1930s imagined that it might be possible to find an indigenous route toward modernity that was neither capitalist nor collectivist, a third way in which cottage industries of small, local producers would replace urban agglomerations of industrial workers or huge collectivized farms. But these daydreams failed just as completely as their fascist counterparts in the debacle of World War II. The East European nations entered this devastating war among the poorest in Europe. Only the Czech lands had achieved a developed level of agricultural and industrial production. Poland’s industrial base of 1938 was statistically only slightly behind that of Italy, but like the other East European economies it was pervaded by cartels, monopolies, state ownership, and state controls that “bore only passing resemblance to the classical model of competitive capitalism.”!° And

the poverty was frightening. In the poorer parts of Croatia, for example, more than half the population had no sanitary facilities at all, not even an outdoor privy—they just relieved themselves in the woods.!! Even without the destruction of the war, therefore, all the East European peoples would have entered the postwar period bereft of much usable political experience and burdened with difficult tasks of economic reorganization and development. The desire for a new start, for a real change, for something different from the

tired solutions of the 1930s, therefore, was strong throughout Europe after the war. For most Europeans, East and West, it seemed that the only way to attack the unprecedented problems of rebuilding and modernization would be for the state to take over the planned direction of the economy. The newly elected Labour

6 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

government in Great Britain nationalized health care, railroads, and coal mines, among other things, and by May 1946 fully 20 percent of France’s industrial capacity had been transferred to state ownership.!? In Hungary, Charles Gati estimates that approximately half the voters in 1945 favored a revolutionary change of some kind, although not necessarily a Communist one, and in Poland sentiment was similar.!3 Prior to the Communist seizure of power in 1948, all legal parties in Czechoslovakia, not just the Communists, were committed to a policy of nationalization, which was essentially completed before the Communist coup.4 In Bulgaria, which had been a German ally, postwar revulsion at Nazi war crimes and a tradition of pro-Russian sentiment helped pave the way for acceptance of the new Communist regime.!5 “It is true that the Communist party dictatorship was brought to the small East European countries by the victorious troops of Stalin,” said Gaspar Mikl6s Tamas, “but we should admit that we were ready for it.”16 This confidence in state planning was as characteristic of academics as it was

of practical politicians. Economic theorists of the late 1940s disputed the assertions of the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. von Hayek that the lack of competitive prices doomed any scheme of centralized planning to failure. The Polish economist Oskar Lange argued that it would be quite possible for a central planning board, through a rigorous process of trial and error, to achieve prices that “would, or at least could, work much better in a socialist economy than...in a competitive market.”!” Lange believed that centralized planning could create an economy that was as harmonious and efficient as capitalism but that would have the added advantage of being directed toward socially beneficial ends rather than being left alone to create waste, inefficiency, and hardship.!8 As American economist Abram Bergson wrote in 1948, “By now it seems generally agreed [that von Mises’s argument] is without much force.” In addition to the practical need for governmental intervention into postwar economies and the presumed theoretical possibilities of centralized planning, the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, a country most observers had seen in 1939 and 1940 as an industrial giant, suggested that the Soviet system had considerable real-world vigor. The brutality of Stalin’s policies in Eastern Europe, coupled with their long-term failure, have made it difficult for us to recall that in 1945 it was quite possible for honest and intelligent people to believe that the great caesura provided by World War II gave Eastern Europe a historically unique moment at which to ameliorate the failures and injustices of capitalism by adopting Soviet-style socialism.?° Of course East Europeans did not voluntarily adopt socialism after carefully

weighing its possible advantages and pitfalls. Stalin imposed the hyperrationalist vision on Eastern Europe by force. This accounts in good measure for the thoroughness with which Eastern Europe changed in less than a decade from the end of World War II until Stalin’s death. No democracy could have created such havoc in such a short time. The new East European regimes swept aside private property, wiped out the middle class, collectivized agriculture, brought millions of country people to work in the city, dramatically increased the number of

Introduction 7 working women, brought entirely new people to power, reorganized and repopulated all levels of government, created new systems of education and scholarship,

eliminated freedom of expression, turned East European trade away from its natural partnership with Western Europe toward the Soviet Union, propagated a new public ethic, built a strong military, and, in general, seized control of all aspects of public life. Joseph Rothschild has summed up the principles of mature Stalinism that provided the impetus for these changes: Mature Stalinism was characterized by the enforced imitation of Soviet political, administrative, and cultural institutions; absolute obedience to Soviet directive and even hints; administrative supervision by Soviet personnel; bureaucratic

arbitrariness; police terror uncontrolled even by the local party; economic deprivation while pursuing overambitious industrial investment programs and undercapitalized agricultural collectivization drives; colonial-like foreign-trade dependence on the Soviet Union; isolation from the non-Communist world and to some extent even from other people’s democracies; synthetic Russomania;

a mindless cult of Stalin adulation; and resultant widespread social anomie, intellectual stagnation, and ideological sterility. 2!

East European history from World War II until 1989 can be characterized as a sudden, spasmodic moment of imposition of those principles of mature Stalinism followed by thirty-five years of adjustment, tinkering, reform, backsliding, and frustration. In broadest terms this history can be divided into halves, the period before the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when it still seemed possible that Soviet style socialism could work, and the period after 1968, when almost everyone realized it could not. In the 1950s, dramatic confrontations marked the thaw that followed Stalin’s death—workers’ riots in Eastern Germany in 1953; similar riots in Poland in 1956; and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Nevertheless, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe entered the 1960s with great confidence, particularly in the economic prospects of their socialist commonwealth. In 1961 a Soviet party congress declared that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism and was now building the material bases of communism, which would be achieved by 1980. The Czechoslovaks added the word “socialist” to the country’s name (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) and stated confidently that Czechoslovakia was well on its way to creating a “mature socialist society.’22 Most extreme, perhaps, was a confidential (that is, not propaganda) memorandum of autumn 1961 in which the Hungarian National Planning

Office envisioned growth by 1980 that would “not merely exempt our people wholly from problems of livelihood but allow the attainment of consumption targets... sufficient to satisfy the harmonious physical and intellectual needs of man.” The Central Committee agreed, adding that “the proposed levels of consumption will arrive at a standard of saturation on a society-wide scale.”3 This high level of confidence did not reflect the actual state of the centrally planned economies. Among the many reasons they never functioned well, one of the most important is that planners set prices administratively rather than through

market mechanisms. Since this produced prices that bore little relationship to

8 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

costs of production, supplies of raw materials, or demand, the centrally planned economies became very inefficient. Planners tried to correct the overinvestment, the losses, and the shoddy quality that were the indicators of this inefficiency by subsidizing food production and heavy industry and by trying to make the plan more scientific, but both of these remedies actually exacerbated their problems. In the immediate postwar period, Soviet-style economies pursued what they called the extensive strategy of economic development. This strategy sought to create economic growth by adding inputs, such as raw materials and particularly labor. One

of the main thrusts of the economic policies of the pre-1968 period was to build heavy industrial plants that would give employment to formerly underemployed peasants and women, thereby increasing their productivity and creating growth. As implemented by Stalin, the extensive strategy forced the East European economies to turn away from participation in the world economy and orient themselves toward the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The entire strategy was put into effect by means of rigid centralized planning that was consistent with the hyperrationalist belief that only the party leaders had a true understanding of the laws of social development. During the 1950s, the extensive strategy implemented by central planning produced excellent overall rates of growth.”4 But during the 1960s, the centrally planned economies encountered their first indications of an intractable problem. Since most of the underemployed peasants and eligible women by that time had entered the workforce, it was no longer possible to grow by adding more labor. The only other possibility was to increase productivity of the workforce. But this possibility, called the intensive strategy of development, meant importing new technology and then exporting products into the world market to pay for it, which in turn meant adopting world prices and generally turning toward market mechanisms. Soon after Stalin’s death, even before economic problems multiplied, thought-

ful analysts in Eastern Europe had realized these dangers and tried to think of ways to fix the planning mechanisms. In East Germany scholars noted that for planners to plan well, they had to have good data. But this data was generated by the action of economic laws not amenable to intervention by planners, thus undermining the party’s claim that it was able to consciously control every aspect of the system.25 East Germany experimented briefly with what it called a New Economic System in the early 1960s, but Hungary was the country in which reforms went the furthest. In 1963 a study group headed by Rezs6 Nyers, a member of the Central Committee who in the 1980s became a significant player in communism’s collapse, produced a comprehensive assessment of the Hungarian economy, and by the end of 1965 the Central Committee committed itself to real reform based on the idea that Hungary could only advance economically if it reentered the world market. After several years of intensive planning involving thousands of people, the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) took effect January 1, 1968.27 Leonid Brezhnev even tried a few marketizing reforms briefly in the Soviet

Union, but the spontaneity of decision making at the local level they implied struck at the heart of the hyperrationalist principle that the party, as the bearer

Introduction 9

of the true view of history, was the only agent that had the right to direct society.28 The most notorious reform efforts, both politically and economically, took place in Czechoslovakia, in what is known as “the Prague Spring” (discussed in the next chapter). But reform efforts came to an end in 1968 when Warsaw Pact troops led by the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. The end of the Prague Spring and the subsequent enunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that the Soviet Union would aid any previously established socialist regime to stay in power, marked the end of the era when serious people could hope that it would be possible to change the socialist system from within. By giving notice that it would not tolerate any deviations from a neo-Stalinist model nor permit any meddling with its sphere of hegemony, the Soviet Union chilled the new winds that had been blowing through Eastern Europe. The crushing of “socialism with a human face” not only called forth a resigned

sort of political apathy throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but it killed any chance that communist economies could prosper. At the very moment Soviet leaders decided to stick with centralized planning, extensive development, and a closed system, Asian countries like South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand were choosing to dare the rigors of the world market. Twenty years later the Asian Tigers were prospering and the centrally planned economies were collapsing. Brezhnev and his counterparts in Eastern Europe thought they were doing the safe thing in squelching the economic and political reforms proposed in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In fact they were signing the death warrant of the Communist system.

NOTES 1. In June 1990 in Prague, an exhibit of documents and videos from the years preceding the velvet revolution produced as its main reaction laughter (New York Times, June 6, 1990). In January a show in Sofia of cartoons done clandestinely by Todor Tsonov over a thirty-five-year period satirizing Todor Zhivkov, deposed Bulgarian leader, led viewers “to gape, chuckle, even laugh out loud” (New York Times, January 22, 1990). In East Berlin in April 1990 banners from the great mass gatherings of 1989 were juxtaposed to a museum exhibit celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Communist seizure of power. East Germans streamed through the exhibit, “looking hard and laughing harder” (Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1991], 330).

2. For a lament on how little we have learned from the twentieth century, see Tony Judt, “What Have We Learned, If Anything?,” New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008, 16-20. 3. Quoted by Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1970), 10. I would like to thank Richard Wolin for this citation. 4. Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in his Against the Current, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 19. 5. René Déscartes, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason,” The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. and ed. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (n.p.: Dover Publications, 1955), 1: 119.

10 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 6. Quoted by Tony Judt, “The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central Europe,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 2 (1988), 231. 7. Pascal provides a good epigraph for these failures: “Two excesses: to exclude reason,

to admit nothing but reason” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées [New York: Viking Penguin, 1966], 85).

8. The idea of pluralism has a long history in American and British thought in particular, with James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville being among its most famous early theorists and Isaiah Berlin among the more recent advocates. Lately a notion of “new pluralism” has emerged that seeks to enhance the ideal of pluralism in the face of the many failings that pluralist societies and theorizing have exhibited. Foremost among the new pluralists is William Connolly, such as Pluralism (Durham, N.C-.: Duke University Press, 2005), but see also William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

9. For an elaboration of this viewpoint, see Gale Stokes, “Stalinism and Pluralism: Two Pathways from the Enlightenment,” in Towards a New Community: Culture and Politics in Post-Totalitarian Europe, ed. Peter J. S. Duncan and Martyn Rady (Hamburg and Munster: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1993), 13-26.

10. John M. Montias, Central Planning in Poland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), 50. See also Martin R. Myant, Poland: A Crisis for Socialism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982), 33. 11. Fora graphic discussion of the poverty in rural Croatia, where, for example, almost no households owned a bed, see Rudolf Bicanic, How the People Live: Life in the Passive Regions (Peasant Life in Southwestern Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina; Yugoslavia in 1935), trans. Stephen Clissold, rev. Marian Despalatovic, ed. Joel M. Halpern and Elinor Murray Despalatovic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Department of Anthropology, Research Report no. 21, 1981). 12. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 70. “What all planners had in common,” Judt writes, “was belief in an enhanced role for the state in social and economic affairs” (69). 13. Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 69; see also Neal Ascherson, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution (New York: Viking, 1982), 35-36. 14. Martin R. Myant, The Czechoslovak Economy 1948-1988: The Battle for Economic Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4-8. “The atmosphere in Czechoslovakia at the time was favorable for [nationalization] because the desire for greater equality had deep historical roots in... broad segments of society” (Alice Teichova, The Czechoslovak Economy 1918-1980 [London: Routledge, 1988], 101). 15. John R. Lampe, The Bulgarian Economy in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 124. 16. G. M. Tamas, “Farewell to the Left,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 5 (1991): 92. 17. Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938), 89. Lange’s formulations were better than most,

but they used average rather than marginal cost and exhibited an inability, without private ownership, to determine accurate pricing. When Hayek pointed this out, Lange responded in a personal letter saying, “I do not propose price fixing by a real

Introduction 11 central planning board as a practical solution. It was used in my paper only as a methodological device” (quoted by Gabriel Tempkin, “On Economic Reforms in Socialist

Countries: The Debate on Economic Calculation under Socialism Revisited,” Communist Economies 1 [1989]: 38). Lange did not make this damaging admission public, however. 18. Note, however, that the socialist argument is based on the same underlying goal as neoclassical economics: efficiency in resource allocation. For a persuasive argument that this assumption has led to a serious misunderstanding of socialist economies, see Peter Murrell, The Nature of Socialist Economies: Lessons from Eastern European Foreign Trade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), the thesis of which is more fundamental than its subtitle suggests. 19. Abram Bergson, “Socialist Economics,” in A Survey of Contemporary Economics, ed. Howard S. Ellis (Philadelphia: The Blakiston Company, for the American Economic Association, 1948), 412. 20. For excellent accounts of intelligent, concerned, and well meaning people becoming communists in the immediate postwar period, see Heda Margolius Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 (Cambridge, Mass., Holmes and Meier, 1997), 52-66; and Janos Kornai, By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2006), chapter 2, “How I Became a Communist 1945-1947,” 23-39, 21. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145-146. 22. Myant, Czechoslovak Economy, 91. 23. Ivan Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms, 1953-1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 147. 24. David S. Mason, Revolution in East-Central Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism and the Cold War (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 20-21. By the mid-1970s growth rates started to decline.

25. On these issues, see the excellent study by Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 26. Laszlé Szamuely, “The First Wave of the Economic Mechanism Debate and the 1968 Reform in Hungary (1954-1957),” Acta Oeconomica 29/1-2 (1982): 1-23; and idem, “The Second Wave of the Economic Mechanism Debate and the 1968 Reform in Hungary,” Acta Oeconomica 33/1-2 (1984): 43-67. 27. On Hungarian reform see Xavier Richet, The Hungarian Model: Markets and Planning in a Socialist Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 28. Myant gives a telling example of how improper it was for low-ranking party members to raise serious economic questions. When the party organization in the main Tatra factory in Koprivnice inquired why Czechoslovakia stressed heavy industry when it lacked the necessary raw materials, they were accused of being an “anti-state” group and eleven party members were disciplined (Myant, The Czechoslovak Economy, 111). Earlier, in East Germany, when a Minister of Justice “called for judges to take account of the right to strike embodied in the 1949 constitution when ruling on those arrested during the June 17, 1953, uprising, he was declared a traitor and sentenced to eight years in jail” (Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory, 65-66).

12 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

8° é/ J SWEDEN) Le” | ) 24° 32° \40' DENM p’. C\ | \ | | \ Fr as gt. Ke nn .,- reofi al

hie ot, el ae | \ .~ | ¢ Warsaw fa pa) 7sus rl EAST 3 * " i? GERMANY *, POLAND 7 oO ne WEST 0 nA, Oo . U S S Ri -— , P: —Ss Gdansk /é, re4 |an| "|Berlin / \t \| NETHERLANDS “es «| y, =

‘tehaedl ran GERMANY v"— Prague rr ==m © 7 — - ; . cr | nal en ~ -flT ee — ||

awy te as ral fm A f “CHO. at yah H | a| i ‘ i Os Ky 4attahe

sD , OLyfoFna oe r +wei |j6ai aFionj 5Pia ca et —a

< Th — % ath, a| _; ep 1 i i ¢ |‘|.~(i} | el > B 42 AWIT? Rg AUSTRIA | .. Budapest beot AN HyAzo OF yy fk ey . AERT NE HUNGARY F 5 :} > ce de_ en alt Riek O 3t ROMANIA a ;ent ” “FEE

ww | . % “Timisoara | © i é |< ~— ie Se ™~ITALY | apa ‘a LAD Bucharest }! € Ala | a O aoe 3 lntonk om” Yo X 2 YUGOSLAVIA 2 _ Eiaet SEs °

\ ~ ch ¥ a_ =tyBULGARIA) iis oneal gr |i AN il

a oe. “oo LS ILGs i r0=ae 14a f [ . Sy ak mes 4 iP 3 = ae, A : bs te, ; ~~». gh. Sohal eS ——— \~ | \ . 7 “eh a *3 . = 3 - u | - . Me —_ e } | —" Tyrrhenian = {_ ?peel f °Fm a ae. eee | i} \ “a *, — & ; yo 1 \ ] ea Ly ~~ | Sey ete yg | : ~ ; = ¥ A L BA N I A j rt wil cs co mn =

ee The Pm™) % of}LARP 7 sd | - ah Iron o> 7 Curtain / sy ’ \ Ly 4 ue i 7 1 row Naa ikoas i GL,a GREECE w\ .*)af&a — ; : oh © Warsaw Pact 1955-1991 es Aad 4 % Aegean )SRPSKA a “Luka..." “ee oe BEloracte

, || | ak BOSNIA =... =: } 4 ss | ae “AND ee : “), ee = on “ a. :, La Ae 4|

boundary | Line (IEBL) | @ 2 ,00Mranto = 4 50 7‘ae—— 50Kilometers Miles “2 | 1s | 99| | —_ StateAutonomous boundary ALBANIA |r -----province |\

wooone Inter-Entity Boundary ot

(Davton agreement line) Piha of | GREECE 5 =.

Map 3 Western Balkans 2010.

CHAPTER 1

a,

The New Opposition Antipolitics and Solidarity

T he suppression of the Prague Spring was a depressing moment for Socialists on both side of the Iron Curtain. Socialism has “sustained so many blows,’ a group of leftist scholars gathered at Reading University in England in the summer of 1973 complained, that “the idea itself seems to be dying in socialist countries.”! The Soviet invasion had made it bitterly clear to these scholars that socialism sustained itself east of the Elbe River not because of the purity of its aims, the clarity of its analysis, or the humanity of its methods but by coercion, compulsion, duress, and violence. The impact among intellectuals in Eastern Europe was even more dramatic. “The fun was definitely over,” said Vaclav Havel.? But unlike

their colleagues in the West, many of the East Europeans abandoned socialism altogether. After Stalin’s death in 1953 some intellectuals had begun to criticize their regimes, but almost always using Marxist categories and rhetoric. After 1968, with some exceptions in Hungary and East Germany, that vocabulary disappeared among oppositionists and a new rhetoric of antipolitics appeared. At the same time a potent new phenomenon appeared in Poland—the independent workers’ movement called “Solidarity.”

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF 1968 During the 1960s most oppositionists retained a commitment to the ideals of socialism, however they understood them, and voiced their opposition in Marxist terms. Just as many East European economists at that time still believed it possible to reform the centrally planned economies by creating “social” rather than “state” property, by introducing workers’ self-management, or by increasing enterprise autonomy, so many critics of the Stalinist political system maintained their belief in revolutionary socialism. A striking example was the Open Letter to the Party written in 1965 by two Warsaw University graduate students. Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski conceded that after the war Poland needed

rapid industrialization and that this constituted a bona fide policy aim of the 15

16 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

new government, but they argued that by vesting all power in the hands of the central bureaucracy the party had created a new class whose industrialization policies benefited no element in society except itself. Yugoslav Milovan Djilas had been among the first to invoke the term new class to describe the apparat that ran Communist systems. In 1956 Djilas correctly foresaw that when the day came for that class to leave the historical scene, “there will be less sorrow over its passing than there was for any other class before it.”"4 But Kuron and Modzelewski went further—they called for bringing that day closer through a revolution that

would rid society of the parasitic class of bureaucrats and would create a true workers’ democracy. Even though the two authors did not publish this essay, did not lecture on it, and did not agitate on its behalf, they were convicted of advocating the overthrow of the Polish state and spent three years in prison.° Another, more sophisticated example of principled criticism of socialism by socialists was the work of the philosophers who surrounded the Yugoslav journal Praxis.6 In place of the mechanical and formulaic dialectical materialism drawn

from Marx’s mature text Capital, the Praxis philosophers cultivated a philosophy of authentic action, genuine needs, and transformative growth inspired by Marx’s early work. “The basic purpose of critical inquiry,’ one of the leading Praxis authors said, “is the discovery of those specific social institutions and structures that cripple human beings, arrest their development and impose on them patterns of simple, easily predictable, dull, stereotyped behavior.” It did not take a particularly acute League of Yugoslav Communists to grasp which institution in Yugoslav society the Praxis philosophers considered dull and stereotyped. Nevertheless, the Praxis group dominated Yugoslav philosophical thought in the reformist 1960s and through its journal had a significant impact on leftist thought throughout Europe.® This style of opposition reached its peak in 1968, when events in three East European countries showed its limitations. The most famous but not the most productive of these events was the Prague Spring itself.» During the 1960s Czechoslovakia experienced a cultural revival that was not associated with Marxism at all. Novels such as Ludvik Vaculik’s The Axe and Milan Kundera’s The Joke matched the vibrancy of Czech theater, particularly the plays of Vaclav Havel, while a new wave of Czech films impressed critics throughout the world. In 1965 a group of writers not associated with the Communist party were even able to establish an independent literary journal, Tvdr (Face), the first of its kind, and in 1967 several writers spoke out boldly at the annual meeting of the writers union. On that occasion Kundera criticized those “who live only in the immediate present, unaware of historical continuity and without culture,” because such people “are capable of transforming their country into a desert without history, without memory, without echoes, and without beauty. "9 Tvar was able to publish for a short time and writers were able to get the speeches from the 1967 conference into print because the party contained a group of reform-minded people, “antidogmatists” Havel called them, who, while retaining their confidence in socialism, believed the system could be softened

CHAPTER 1 ¢ The New Opposition 17

and made to work in a more democratic way. In October 1967 one of these persons, Alexander Dubéek, raised a question in an otherwise routine meeting of the Central Committee that set the events of the next year in motion. Dubéek, a Slovak who had grown up in the Soviet Union, was among those suggesting

that the economic reforms then under consideration would harm Slovakia, which contained many of the country’s least efficient factories.' At the fateful October meeting he continued speaking of Slovakia’s needs and made the suggestion, radical for its time, that party functions be separated from those of the state. The Stalinist head of the party, Antonin Novotny, who was also president of Czechoslovakia, correctly perceived these comments as a challenge to his authority.!2 Even Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev weighed in on the unprecedented and bitter internal debate that followed. But when Brezhnev’s support proved lukewarm at best, early in 1968 Novotny had to give over leadership of the party to Dubéek. The loosening up of censorship under Dubcek and the adoption of the party's “Action Program” of April 1968 produced enormous ferment in Czechoslovak society. Characteristically, however, almost no one was prepared to call for the abandonment of socialism. Even one of the most radical and, to the Soviets at least, most disturbing proposals, Vaclav Havel’s suggestion to create “a dignified counterpart of the Communist party, was couched in terms of democratic socialism.!3 Havel and others who stood outside the system did not believe in socialism particularly, but they did not reject its goal of social justice either. Given the power of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia and the overhanging presence of the Soviet Union, dreams of anything other than a reformed socialism were unrealistic, if not downright suicidal. Their hope was to create “socialism with a human face.” The crushing blow to all who hoped to humanize the Stalinist system came on August 21, 1968, when the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia and, within a few months, installed a new leadership under Gustav Husak. Two other countries in Eastern Europe had their 1968s, as indeed did France in a different way. In June, students occupied Belgrade University, creating a small-scale version of the massive student demonstrations that had taken place in Paris in May." After several days of disciplined and principled confrontation in which the students demanded improvements in the curriculum, better job prospects, and a more open party life, President Josip Broz Tito calmed the situation with a speech in which he admitted the justice of many of the students’ complaints and promised to take them into account. Many students greeted Tito’s intervention with great enthusiasm—“Tito is with us!” they exulted—but as the summer wore on most realized that their hopes had been misplaced. Party cadres purged reformist elements, the student newspaper continued to find itself in hot water, and no substantive reforms of student life took place.!5 Since the Belgrade students had stuck closely to the etiquette of party forms during their

protest, their disenchantment when they returned in the fall was that much greater. The Belgrade student revolt remained a high point in that generation’s

18 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

collective memory—it was “the moment when I became an adult,” one participant recalled.'* But the disillusionment, which extended as well to some party members who had felt Yugoslav socialism was different from that of its repressive neighbors, did not create an antipolitical reaction. Instead, Yugoslav estrangement found its outlet in nationalism, a subject that will be discussed separately in chapter 6. Student rebellion in Poland in the first three months of 1968 was angrier and more violent than in Belgrade. For students slowly becoming disillusioned with Marxism, the arrest of Kuron and Modzelewski in 1965 was simply the most egregious affront in a long series of harassments by the authorities. The students’ efforts reached a climax early in January 1968. At that time Warsaw theater audiences had taken to applauding a production of Adam Mickiewicz’s nineteenth-century play Forefathers whenever lines such as “Moscow sends only rogues to Poland” came up. This show of hostility to what Poles considered almost an occupying power caused the regime so much embarrassment that it decided to close the production. The students seized the opportunity to turn the final performance into an antigovernment demonstration, to which the regime responded by arresting some thirty-five student leaders. As their riposte, the students of Warsaw University came out on strike. In Paris the massive student strikes of May 1968 led within one year to the fall of Charles de Gaulle, while in Belgrade Tito found a way to calm the students with false promises. Wladislaw Gomulka was neither as honorable as de Gaulle nor as clever as Tito. His police moved in, clubbing and beating students on university grounds that had hitherto been considered inviolable. Gomutka closed down the faculties of economics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology; expelled student leaders; and dismissed six professors, including the soon-to-be famous philosopher Leszek Kotakowski and Zygmunt Bauman, who became a prominent sociologist as a professor at Leeds University.” The ugliest feature of these “March Days,” as they became known to Poles, was the vicious campaign of anti-Semitism that accompanied it. The regime extended its attacks on student leaders, some of whom had Jewish family backgrounds, to the relatively small remaining population of Polish Jews that had survived the Holocaust. Merely to be of Jewish origin, or even to express support for Israel, was sufficient to merit vilification in the media and humiliation in raucous public meetings as an element hostile to the Polish state. Even though most of the student protesters had not been Jewish, by the end of 1968 most of the 13,000 or so Jews remaining in Poland had been forced to emigrate.!8 For the Polish intelligentsia, the March Days were as wrenching a turning point as the Prague Spring was for the Czechs and Slovaks. Before 1968 the regime had nourished hopes that the system could still be reformed by maintaining what David Ost calls a “coquettish” social democratic relationship with the intelligentsia.9 Adam Michnik even claimed that the students he led were only trying to be

true Communists according to the definition he had learned from his Boy Scout leader (who was Jacek Kuron!).2° But the removal of the final veil covering the

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 19

regime's mindless face destroyed any hope of reform based on the ideals of 1956. The jail sentences that many of the protesters suffered, or their summary induction into the army, were no less than they expected, but the primitiveness of the regime's attacks produced a shock of revulsion that no amount of later equivocation could erase. Equally depressing was the paucity of support the students and their professors received from the working class of Poland. It was not that no workers protested. In fact, more than 25 percent of those arrested in March 1968 were classified as “workers.”2! But no groundswell of strikes swept the factories to overwhelm the repressive measures, and the regime had little difficulty finding workers to demonstrate against the young protesters.

GIEREK’S POLAND The relative apathy among the Polish working class in 1968 did not mean that it was satisfied with Gomulka. Quite the contrary. The worker's turn for outrage came in December 1970, when, without prior preparation, the government decreed a significant rise in the price of basic foodstuffs. From the technical point of view there is little question that highly subsidized food prices needed adjust-

ment, but raising them just before the Christmas and New Year's holidays, the most important time of family and church celebrations, was particularly inept. But Polish regimes never fully grasped that nothing was more difficult than taking away a perquisite that the public had come to perceive as one of the few benefits of socialism: low prices for basic needs. It is as if the population had worked

out an arrangement with the party: you subsidize housing, medical care, and food, and we will not complain about the arbitrary way you run society. On the first working day after the announcement, three thousand workers in the Gdansk shipyard demonstrated before party headquarters, and in the next few days strikes and demonstrations quickly spread to other industrial cities along the Baltic coast.22 The rigid Gomutka refused any concessions to what his prime minister called “scum, adventurers, anarchist hooligans, criminal elements, enemies of socialism, and enemies of Poland.”’23 Gomutka hectored his politburo into authorizing the use of the military and eventually a massive force consisting of perhaps thirty-five thousand troops with tanks and armored vehicles took up positions in the main port cities on the Baltic. On December 15 police in Gdansk opened fire on workers, and in the ensuing melee the party headquarters building burned down. Troops and police fired on workers in Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin also, eventually killing 44 and wounding 1,164 persons.24 Thoroughly panicked by what appeared to be a workers’ revolution and assisted by apparent Soviet indifference to Gomutka’s fate, party leaders hastily chose a new chief, Edward Gierek. But the damage had been done.?5 On December 18, workers in the Warski Shipyard in Szczecin and a repair shipyard in nearby Gryfino, who were surrounded by troops that confined them

to their factories, elected strike committees and agreed on a common set of twenty-one demands.*° The first of these was that “independent trade unions

20 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

dependent on the working class” take the place of the party dominated Central Trade Union Council. Thus appeared for the first time the principle that became the backbone of Solidarity’s program in 1980 and 1981, the self-governing, independent trade union. That same evening delegates from ten striking factories in and near Szczecin formed the Citywide Strike Committee, the forerunner of Solidarity’s Interfactory Strike Committee of ten years later. Within a few days ninety-four nearby striking workplaces signified their adherence to the committee. Despite these propitious beginnings and the rediscovery by the Szczecin workers of the efficacy of the occupation strike, in which the workers take control of the factory rather than staying at home, within days the two main leaders of the Warski workers, both of them party members, agreed to a settlement, betting mistakenly that the party would make good on its promises of reform. The strikes fizzled out, but an important milestone had been passed: self-activated

workers had demanded the right to conduct their own union affairs and had momentarily found strategies—the occupation strike and the interfactory strike committee—that would work in the future. Resentments boiled over again in Szczecin in January 1971, when the government faked a television report that showed workers there vigorously supporting new party leader Gierek and agreeing “voluntarily” to work an extra Sunday. Suddenly the Baltic coast was on strike again. On January 24 Gierek, alarmed by renewed rejection of his regime, undertook an unprecedented gesture. He made surprise appearances at the Warski Shipyard in Szczecin and the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. In lengthy confrontations that were broadcast live, Gierek appealed to huge crowds of gathered workers on the basis of their solidarity as working-class people. He himself had worked for twenty-two years in coal mines and similar positions in France and Belgium, he said, and he knew what the workers wanted and needed. “I say to you: Help us, help me....I1 am only a worker like you.... But now, and I tell you this in all solemnity as a Pole and as a Communist, the fate of our nation and the cause of socialist are in the balance.”2” “We will help! We will help!” rolled back the roar of the people crowded in the square in Gdansk, where only a month before their compatriots had been shot by Gierek’s predecessor. Frustrated and angry, the workers were at the same time impressed that Gierek had actually come to talk with them personally, and they believed him when he said he would see to their needs. Still, the government had not rolled back its price increases. But in midFebruary the Marchlewski cotton mill in Lé6dz went out on strike, followed by a number of others in fields where the work force was primarily women. When a government official came to the Lédz strikers and asked for their help as Gierek had done, the striking women “responded with a resounding NO!"?8 Party leaders more or less knew how to deal with the workers in the mines, steel mills, and shipbuilding yards, who were male and typically organized strike committees available for negotiation. But they were baffled by the less organized and yet more intransigent stance of the women strikers. Moved to action by the Lédz strikes, Gierek started to make good on his word by restoring 1965 prices, by

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 21

rescinding an unpopular system of incentive bonuses based on piecework, and by raising wages and pension payments for many workers. “Consumption must become the engine of growth,” said one of the theorists of the government’s new policy.?°

Gierek naturally assumed that what the workers wanted was to have a sausage stuffed in their mouths, as one observer crudely put it.3° He tried to oblige them, almost literally. The Soviet Union helped immediately with a $100 million advance to buy meat abroad. In 1971 government procurement agencies raised prices paid for slaughter cattle and agreed to buy all the cattle farmers could produce. In 1972 Gierek dropped compulsory crop deliveries, lowered peasant taxes, extended national health care to peasants, and granted legal ownership rights to almost one million peasants with unsettled claims.3! Of the more than $20 billion Poland borrowed abroad in the 1970s, $6 billion went for the importation of foodstuffs, a high proportion of which was grain that went into the production of meat.32 Between 1969 and 1979 these policies pushed meat consumption up 40 percent to a level equal to that of Italy and Great Britain.» But Gierek gained no political benefit from this success. He increased the meat supply, but he increased wages too. Real per capita income rose at an average rate of 7.7 percent from 1971 through 1975.34 More meat appeared in state stores at low prices, but more money chased it, so that meat remained scarce and lines at butcher shops were common. Since the Poles are great meat eaters, or, to put it more formally, since the elasticity of demand for meat in Poland is very high, the government could never produce or import enough meat to meet the demand generated by higher wages. The public sense, therefore, was simply continuing shortage. Increasing consumption was only one aspect of Gierek’s overall plan. In return for more meat he wanted more work, or at least more effective work. But for the workers to become more efficient Poland needed better technology, which meant importing it from the West. This is what Gierek decided to do, although he had no intention of adopting the full schedule of reforms that a real turn toward the intensive strategy of development would entail. The imported technology would be financed with foreign loans, which in theory would be retired once appropriate capital investments had enabled Polish industries to modernize and to produce competitive exportable products. By chance, loans for this purpose became widely available after the oil crisis of 1973, as international banks sought to recycle a massive supply of newly generated petrodollars. Poland seemed a relatively attractive economy in which to place hard currency loans because it exported coal, a reliable, low-tech natural resource whose value had increased because of the energy crisis. At the beginning of Gierek’s regime hopes for positive economic results temporarily rose. Known himself as technically competent and with a good reputation for administration, Gierek assembled a team of technicians rather than a team of party bureaucrats and began “Building a New Poland,” as they put it. In actuality the specialists proved no more able than their predecessors to resist the

22 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

pressures of industrial and regional lobbies, in good measure because they themselves were drawn from those lobbies, as was Gierek himself. More concerned

perhaps with their industrial clients than with the balance of the economy as a whole, they accelerated investment to almost 30 percent of the gross national product by 1975, 50 percent higher than in the pre-1970 period.35 This produced

the inflationary pressures characteristic of such a policy but without creating either new productive capacity or more efficient old capacity. Both domestically generated investment and the huge foreign loans disappeared into the inefficient

heavy industries that had always gobbled them up, such as the steel works at Katowice, and into poorly conceived new projects based on expensive Western license agreements, such as an ill-fated agreement between the Ursus tractor factory and the international firm of Massey-Ferguson-Perkins, which produced

little increase in farm productivity but saddled Poland with a large hard currency debt.%¢

Bad as it was, Gierek’s inability to use the infusion of foreign capital effectively was not his most fundamental mistake. He based his entire policy of consumerism and intensive development on a misperception of what the workers actually wanted. Yes, they wanted sausage, and it was imperative to do what was possible to provide it. But they also wanted dignity, self-respect, autonomy, and acceptance. “Even if people never speak of it,’ Vaclav Havel said in a famous open letter to Czechoslovak party leader Gustav Husak in 1975, they “have a very acute appreciation of the price they have paid for outward peace and quiet: the permanent humiliation of their human dignity.”37 “It was not the compulsion, the use of force so much,” said one participant in the strikes in Szczecin in 1970 and 1971, “but the moral element, the element of honor [that motivated us].” Polish

workers wanted no more than what all conscious people in the postindustrial age want: to be autonomous actors in their own lives. Despite their shouts of “we will help” and Gierek’s apparent commitment to help them, in fact the workers in this workers’ state regarded the regime as false, restrictive, humiliating, and oppressive—as “Lackeys of Moscow!” as one of the first wall slogans to appear in Gdansk in 1970 put it.38 The leaders of Communist parties throughout Eastern Europe who attempted what in Hungary was called “goulash communism’ were constantly surprised by this feeling, but they should not have been. The workers’ feelings were simply a

mirror image of the partys own condescension toward the working class. No Leninist really believed workers could understand their own interests. Left to their own devices, they would be co-opted into the capitalist system by offers of higher wages and other benefits, thereby sacrificing for temporary and passing gains the transcendental success to be won by revolution. This supposed weakness was precisely the one Gierek hoped to exploit. He assumed that to swallow more sausage, Polish workers would continue to swallow the humiliation of being treated as dependents. In one way this was an advance over Stalinist strategies, which gave workers neither sausage nor dignity. But by suggesting that sausage really was the important thing, and not socialism, Gierek tacitly admitted that

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 23

the idea of a vanguard party leading the country to socialism was just what the opposition said it was: “a dead creature, an empty gesture, an official ritual.”39 For all this, no regime could abandon the hyperrationalist ideology of the allknowing vanguard party because it was the justification for the system through which the party ruled. In Gierek’s case, as long as he could contrive to keep the standard of living on the rise he could hope to hold back the tide of resentments many members of society felt at their lack of control over their lives. But as soon as the bribery faltered, as it was bound to given the inefficiencies of the central planning system, the emptiness of the reservoir of belief would be revealed: As philosopher Leszek Kotakowski put it in 1971, “the dead and by now also grotesque creature called Marxism-Leninism still hangs at the necks of the rulers like a hopeless tumor.”?°

THE ANTIPOLITICIANS Kolakowski’s graphic remark came in an article entitled “Hope and Hopelessness,” which appeared in 1971 in Kultura (Culture), a distinguished

and highly influential Polish émigré journal published in Paris. His title expressed the grave moral problem East Europeans faced after the depressing events of 1968. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev asserted that “the triumph of the socialist system in a country can be regarded as final” and pledged to use “the armed might of the socialist commonwealth” to make sure it remained so.41 How could one live a genuinely authentic life knowing that there was no hope of resisting the overwhelming

power of the Soviet Union, which stood prepared to sustain an emotionally and intellectually barren despotism in Eastern Europe indefinitely? As Jacek Kuron put it much later, “What is to be done when nothing can be done?”*? The post-1968 depression in Eastern Europe was severe, but in a way it was a blessing, because by asking, as a Hungarian philosopher did at the end of the 1970s, “What can we do at the place where we live, which we are most familiar with, where we can best grasp the situation?” many East Europeans began to find the road that led them finally from Stalinism to pluralism.*? No longer harboring any illusions about socialism, they were free to think freshly. The first step was

simply to admit that in traditional political terms the situation was hopeless. In his essay Kotakowski listed the reasons why this was so. Democratization of socialist regimes was impossible, he said, since every democratizing reform appropriates some aspect of the total control the regime enjoys and will not relinquish. Freedom of information was also unthinkable, as was any extension or rights. Even though the governing apparatus will inevitably suffer moral and mental decline, Kotakowski predicted that it would remain aggressive and attempt to destroy all forms of social life not directly related to itself. A “technocratic” revolution, such as Gierek claimed to be instituting in Poland, was therefore impossible, Kolakowski argued, since it implied a progressive abandonment by the regime of its authority.

24 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

In this bleak situation, was there any space for hope? For Kolakowski, the very necessity of regimes to concentrate power hinted at a potential weakness. The conflicts of interest that inevitably occur among the leadership (“life sows confusion in their council chambers,” is the way Havel put it) are hidden behind an ideological screen.*4 This will complete the work of depriving the system of the small remaining meaning and is therefore a cause for hope that the system is not as eternal and all-powerful as it presents itself as being. But for Kotakowski true hope did not lie in the working out of the inevitable historical process of the system’s division and decline. That kind of thinking was the underlying mistake of hyperrationalism. Hope lay with the power of individuals to think that honesty is possible. Accepting the principle that the system is utterly unreformable makes “every act of cowardice, passivity and cooperation with evil” possible. Instead, Kotakowski argued, we must move beyond mere acceptance to live an ethical life in which we are not silent in the face of knavery, servile to those in authority, or accepting of the petty gifts of our oppressors. Hope, that is, lay in living an ethical life, not in forming a political opposition, because the very act of forming an opposition based on a particular political program ran the risk of simply substituting one form of utopianism for another. “By using force to storm the existing Bastilles we shall unwittingly build new ones,” Adam Michnik wrote.*5 Vaclav Havel felt that it was depraved to oppose the post-

totalitarian system with an approach in “which people are first organized in one way or another (by someone who always knows best ‘what the people need’) so they may then allegedly be liberated.” “My greatest nightmare,’ Gyorgy Konrad said, “is to have to tell millions of people what to do next.”47 These men rejected the entire hyperrationalist premise of modern politics—that all social life is essentially political—in favor of its opposite, an ethic of antipolitics. Having accepted the hopelessness of changing the false but powerful political structures they confronted, the antipoliticians focused on the interior ethical world of the individual as the space in which change could occur. Living the truth might have an impact in the traditional world of politics someday, or it might not, but in any event it would at least be an authentic way to live in a world of lies. For an antipolitician like Havel even the term hope needed a redefinition. It was not the optimism that a better future was in store, nor a prognostication of some saving event, he argued, but an orientation of the spirit, “the certainty that something makes sense.”48 The fact that we are surrounded by lies, Havel believed, does not excuse us from doing our best to live in the truth. And this sphere, the realm of the ethical, is where real life resides. The alienation one feels in the totalitarian state is possible precisely because there actually is something in human beings to alienate. “Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, there-

fore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims.... The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere.”9 The ability to find this sphere of the authentic and to live according to it was what Havel called “the power of the powerless.”5°

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 25

At the Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers, held in the summer of 1967, Ludvik Vaculik, speaking as a “citizen of a state which I will never abandon, but in which I cannot contentedly live,” called upon the writers to “make speeches as if we were grown up and legally independent.”5! In the 1970s, living “as if” emerged as a numerically minuscule but ideologically devastating threat to the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. As long as some shred of belief in reform

existed and traditional political ideologies motivated the opposition, regimes knew what to do. They co-opted those whom they could convince reform was possible and isolated the rest. But when people in different walks of life began “living in truth,” regimes found themselves contesting a space they could not enter. A Polish writer, Konstanty Gebert, put it this way: “A small, portable barricade between me and silence, submission, humiliation, shame. Impregnable for tanks, uncircumventable. As long as I man it, there is, around me, a small area of freedom.”>? Immune from corruption by the sphere of lies, living the truth was a subversive, implacable, and unreachable opponent. “Is not honesty,” asked the Romanian writer Norman Manea, “in the final analysis the mortal enemy of totalitarianism?’53 During the 1970s the most powerful answer to the question of how to live in a hopeless situation proved to be classically simple and impossibly difficult: live honestly—undertake that ““hopeless enterprise’ which stands at the beginning of most good things.”*4

HELSINKI AND CHARTER 77 Not everyone agreed that living in truth was a practical strategy. For example, the

noted Czech novelist and former Communist Milan Kundera believed that the era of major changes was over and that it was pointless, even harmful, to engage in a “risky strategy.’ It was “Czech destiny” as a small nation to provide inspiration such as the Prague Spring but to be overwhelmed by the great powers. His solution to hopelessness was to accept the regime's offer of emigration and move to France. In a sense this was a victory for the government, since Kundera left it in command of a terrain of its own choosing. The antipoliticians who refused to emigrate, including Havel, found a remarkably clear and powerful strategy to contest that terrain, a strategy that had already been tried in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. They simply demanded that regimes follow their own laws on human rights, which of course was the last thing that regimes were willing to do. For more than a century Marxists had occupied the moral high ground in politics by claiming to be the true opponents of repression. When the antipoliticians began to show the hollowness of that pretension with their simple but effective strategy of living in truth, they began to edge the Communists off that high ground and to assume the moral leadership of their societies. A major stimulus for pushing this moral struggle beyond the interior world of the individual was the signing of the Helsinki Agreements of 1975.56 These agreements concluded a two-year series of negotiations concerning peace and security in Europe that had become possible in the early 1970s, when West Germany

26 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

changed its long-standing policy of hostility toward East Germany. Ever since the creation of two Germanies after World War II the Soviet Union had advocated an international conference to regularize the status of East Germany and to confirm

the western border of Poland, but under Konrad Adenauer West Germany had refused to deal with East Germany at all. As soon as a new West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, announced a policy of reconciliation with East Germany in 1969 (Ostpolitik), the Soviet Union renewed its calls for such a conference. Formal negotiations began in 1973, and in the summer of 1975 representatives of thirty-five countries, including all of those in Eastern Europe except Albania, signed the Final Act in Helsinki. Since the Helsinki accords did recognize East Germany and did guarantee all current European borders, it appeared that Soviet policy had been crowned with success. Many conservatives in Europe and in the United States condemned the Helsinki accords as simply another caving in to Communist domination of Eastern Europe on the pattern of Yalta, and oppositionists in Eastern Europe feared the same thing. But one section of the accords turned the tables on the doubters and on the Soviets as well. The so-called “Basket Three” of the agreements committed all signatories to respect “civil, economic, social, cultural, and other rights and freedoms, all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.”5? Not only did this portion of the agreement, which went into great detail concerning the exact rights and freedoms envisioned by the accords, give Western powers an excuse to upbraid the Soviet Union and its allies periodically about their failure to live up to its terms, but it gave dissidents within Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union a legal basis to insist that their governments uphold human rights. Helsinki Watch committees appeared in the Soviet Union, Poland, and elsewhere. The most significant initiative was Charter 77, which appeared in Czechoslovakia. The immediate impetus that led to Charter 77 was the arrest and trial of members of a rock music group called The Plastic People of the Universe.*8 Long-haired, antiestablishment, and generally indistinguishable from dozens of similar groups in the West, in Czechoslovakia the Plastics’ aggressive nonconformity, vulgarity, and rejection of normalcy profoundly shocked a regime intent on maintaining a Victorian standard of morality. Vaclav Havel loved rock music for its vibrancy and freedom—he was a Lennonist rather than a Leninist. For him and his friends the Plastics “were simply young people who wanted to live in their own way, to make music they liked, to sing what they wanted to sing, to live in harmony with themselves, and to express themselves in a truthful way. 5° Outraged by the government’s crude attack on the musicians, Havel and his friends mobilized support for the imprisoned musicians abroad among a wide circle of European artists, writers, and intellectuals. Despite the international outcry, the Plastics were convicted. Frustrated, but encouraged by the support they had found abroad, twenty to thirty Czech intellectuals began meeting secretly late in 1976 to see if a next step was possible. The group was enormously varied. It included a former high party official,

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 27

Zdenék Mlynar; an antidogmatic Communist writer, Pavel Kohout; a revolutionary socialist, Petr Uhl; a Catholic writer, Vaclav Benda; and Havel himself, who had never been a Communist. Despite their diversity, they were able to agree on a long-range antipolitical strategy, which they made public in a relatively brief document on January 1, 1977. “Charter 77 is not an organization,” they stated. “It has no rules, permanent bodies, or formal membership. It embraces everyone who agrees with its ideas, participates in its work, and supports it. It does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity.”6° The thrust of this nonorganizational document was to insist that the Czechoslovak government follow the international agreements, including the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the Helsinki agreements, that it had signed in regard to human rights. Three spokespersons were designated to bring instances of human rights failures to the government's and the public’s attention. In contrast to the clandestine modus operandi characteristic of traditional underground movements, all 243 of the original signatories of the charter indicated their intention to live “as if” they were free by signing their real names and adding their addresses. Responsible, aboveboard and not overtly political, Charter 77 was the epitome of the antipolitical style of opposition.°!

Morally attractive and physically courageous though the antipoliticians’ oppositional tactics might have been, it is important to note that they had little impact on the lives of ordinary people, even in Czechoslovakia. As Paulina Bren has pointed out, the Husak regime was quite successful in propagating the view that the quiet life, one in which one lived well and stayed out of politics, was a viable way to achieve a satisfying existence under normalization. The ordinary Czech was not living “as if,’ but was at home watching television. Czech society was not so much divided between the ruled and the rulers, oppressed and oppressor, us and them, but rather was lubricated by small scale concessions on all sides so that most people were at the same time private and public persons, complicit, so to speak, in the process of living a normal life. Indeed, Vaclav Havel’s second wife noted that she had never heard of Charter 77 until she took up with Havel

in the 1990s.

CIVIL SOCIETY IN POLAND® In Poland an antipolitical form of resistance began to emerge in the early 1970s almost without Poles being aware of it. Inspired in part by Kotakowski’s article “Hope and Hopelessness,” Jacek Kuron identified the development in 1974 in an article entitled “Political Opposition in Poland.” Kuron reiterated the point that in a system that seeks to control the everyday life of its citizens, simply living that life honestly is itself a political act. The preservation of culture, the reading of literature, and the discussion of philosophy constitute political opposition precisely because they ignore politics in a state that insists on saturating everything with politics. In fact, if enough individuals were to draw together into social activities of their own choosing outside of state compulsion, it might be possible to create

28 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

a civil society that achieved much or all of the goals of democratization without transforming the state through traditional means at all.6¢ As Adam Michnik put it shortly after Kuron’s article appeared, the opposition should no longer address itself to the totalitarian state, trying to change the immutable, but to the independent public, or at least to a public living “as if” independent. Polish antipoliticians proposed abandoning traditional political programs in favor of creating a “real day-to-day community of free people.” What did these abstractions mean in practice? The most important answer came in 1976. Gierek’s overheated investment policy during the first five years of his regime left him with few options with which to address economic problems, which remained pressing. He did cut the rate of investment after 1975, and he found surreptitious ways to cut the growth in real wages, but until 1976 he resisted taking the most reasonable step, from the macroeconomic point of view at least, of raising food prices and decreasing subsidies. In that year, however, the increasingly clear evidence of trouble finally convinced him to take even that potentially fatal step. On Saturday, June 24, 1976, a compliant Sejm (the Polish legislature) accepted the government’s recommendation to raise food prices as of Monday, June 26. To no one’s surprise, the strikes began as soon as workers reported for work on Monday. Unlike 1970, however, when the government improvised its repression, in 1976 the regime was well prepared. The largest strikes broke out in Ursus, an industrial section of Warsaw, and Radom, a sizable industrial city and a provincial capital. Workers in Radom had not undergone the learning process that the coastal workers had in 1971, and instead of occupying their plants and forming interfactory strike committees, they marched into town. During the afternoon of the very first day of this demonstration, June 25, the government flew in special police units, and by 7:00 p.m. about two thousand persons already had been arrested. Although almost no one died in the confrontations in Radom and elsewhere, the police used calculated brutality to cow the strikers. A common tactic, used also in 1970, was to run detainees through a “path of health” each time they were taken somewhere. This meant walking along a long line of police officers, each of whom was required to hit the prisoner once.*% In the days and weeks that followed, courts sentenced hundreds of strike participants and sympathizers to fines and jail terms up to ten years, and hundreds more suffered retributions in the form of dismissal, call-up into the army, and assignment to “Centers of Social Rehabilitation.” Despite this show of force, the government revealed its fear and weakness by rescinding the price increases only one day after they had been imposed. Also unlike 1970, many members of the intelligentsia—inspired by the Helsinki accords, in the early phase of working out new notions of civil society, and a little bit guilty about their relative passivity in 1970 and 1971—responded vigorously to the government’s suppressions. In both Radom and Ursus, and even elsewhere, concerned authors, teachers, scout leaders, and lawyers spontaneously began offering legal assistance to the accused and financial assistance

CHAPTER 1+ The New Opposition 29

to their families. Finally in September, almost two months after the idea originally emerged, fourteen activists signed their first “Appeal” and organized themselves as the Committee for the Defense of Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotnik6w—KOR).

Despite KOR’s obvious political significance, its origin lay in a “simple impulse of compassion, as poet Stanislaw Baranczak puts it, and its founders conceived it as an antipolitical organization.*” According to one of its most important organizers, Jan Jozef Lipski, KOR’s mission was threefold: to “appeal above all to ethical values and to general moral standards rather than political attitudes”; to act openly, including revealing the names of all participants; and to conduct its activities within Polish law, relying on the Helsinki accords and the Polish constitution.’ From the beginning, therefore, KOR’s goal was not simply to assist workers, although during its first year it considered direct, one-on-one help its most important practical work, but to “stimulate new centers of autonomous activity in a variety of areas and among a variety of social groups.” In other words, whereas KOR was founded originally to defend unjustly arrested workers and to help their families, as the first year of activity wore on many members realized that the widespread response their relief efforts had evoked offered an unexpected opportunity to turn the abstract notion of civil society into a concrete reality.°° Accordingly, in September 1977 KOR changed its name to the Social Self-Defense Committee “KOR,” retaining the original initials to indicate continuity with its original functions.7”” The term “self-defense” indicates how completely the organizers had abandoned any identification with the party and

state. The state and the party had become the usurpers against whom society must defend itself. Beyond their work with the strikers in Radom, the most important sphere of KOR’ activity became underground publishing. The original models for underground publishing under socialism were the Russian samizdat publications of the 1960s. Samizdat means self-publication (samstvennoye izdatelstvo) as opposed to publication by the state (gosudarstvennoye izdatelstvo), which was abbreviated Gosizdat and was the name of the Soviet state publishing company.”! It achieved currency in the 1960s when a handful of brave Soviet oppositionists began publishing the Chronicle of Current Events. In Eastern Europe such efforts were rare until the 1970s, and even then they achieved real significance only in the northern tier of states. In Czechoslovakia Ludvik Vaculik took the lead in 1972 when

he established his publishing enterprise Petlice (Padlock), which put together typewritten novels, philosophical works, and other forms of belles lettres.72 By 1987 Petlice had produced four hundred volumes of this sort. Vaculik’s effort laid the groundwork for an explosion of illegal publications in Czechoslovakia after the founding of Charter 77.

In both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia the state reacted vigorously to underground publishing, making it difficult for oppositionists to operate at a large scale. In Poland, however, under Gierek’s less compulsive leadership, the authorities limited themselves to harassment rather than to obliteration. The

30 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

initial model of the underground press in Poland was KOR’s Biuletyn Informacyny (Information Bulletin). Its basic purpose was to present factual news to a general

public and the international community, as well as official communiqués from the KOR leadership. A second KOR journal, Gtos (Voice), under the editorship of Antoni Macierewicz, criticized the leaders of Biuletyn Informacyny as too eager to work something out with the regime. Although this criticism did not split KOR decisively at the time, thirty years later it remained a staple of right-wing attacks on Adam Michnik and other leaders of Solidarity. In 1977 Jan Litynski, Henryk Wujec, and five others, including three women, began Robotnik (Worker), intended primarily for factory workers. Robotnik began as a four-page news sheet printed on a mimeograph machine in some four hundred copies, but within a year it was publishing twelve pages every two weeks in approximately twenty thousand copies and the paper was being distributed in factories throughout Poland. Inspired by this example, activists in the Baltic began publishing their own version, Robotnik Wybrzeza (The Coastal Worker). Copycat local publishing efforts elsewhere suggested that Robotnik was beginning to have an impact on the more active factory workers in the major urban centers.73

Equally significant was Mirek Chojecki’s creation of the Independent Publishing House (Niezalezna Oficyna Wydawnicza—NOWA) in August 1977.4

Chojecki’s purpose was strictly cultural, and over the next few years he put together an all-star list of Polish and foreign authors. From its founding until the spring of 1980, NOWA published fifty-five separate volumes averaging two hundred pages in length in editions averaging two thousand copies. This huge achievement was only one of a number of significant publishing efforts.75 By 1979 twenty-five illegal journals were appearing, each with a circulation of over forty thousand copies a year.”6 At the same time, Robotnik achieved a nationwide circulation of approximately fifty thousand a week.77 How was such an extensive illegal effort possible? First of all, KOR supported a number of printing enterprises financially, at least at the start. KOR received its funds primarily from individual donations, a significant number of which came through the Paris journal Kultura from people of Polish descent living abroad. But the biggest problem was technical, not financial. Printing and distributing such a large volume of illegal material was a major organizational problem. Foreign contacts provided some machinery, particularly small duplicators and the like, and some of the biggest jobs were done on state printing presses on off hours or by sneaking them through other press runs. But most of the printing was done by a relatively small number of trained persons who hid out in basements, apartments, peasant houses, and barns, and transported their paper, machines, and supplies from place to place to avoid the police. Each publication built up its own network of clandestine distributors, mostly students and workers. An important ingredient in the relative success of KOR and its publication efforts was that Gierek decided not to push the underground to the wall, or, as critics would have it, Gierek was so indecisive that he was unable to make a decision to do so. Despite many thoroughly unpleasant cases of arrests, beatings,

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 31

and dismissals, Gierek’s regime was relatively tolerant in comparison to the regimes in neighboring countries. The police made a large number of arrests and harassed people they knew were leaders, sometimes even beating them. In the four years from 1976 to 1980, for example, Miroslaw Chojecki suffered a subcutaneous hemorrhage over half his face in a beating by “unknown perpetrators,” dramatically escaped from thugs who were about to throw him down a staircase, spent five months in jail, had his apartment searched fifteen times (during which many of his belongings, including money, were confiscated), and was personally searched at least eighty times under a variety of pretexts, including burglary. But NOWA continued to publish, its readers were not arrested, and no one was sent to a death camp. In contrast to the pinched, suspicious, and puritanical Gomutka, Gierek was an optimist who believed in his ability to inspire confidence, which he attempted to do by innumerable visits to villages and factories. Without humor, and not in any way spontaneous, he perceived himself as the patron of the Polish working class. “Comrades,” Gierek said in a speech to workers in Katowice in November 1979, “you know me well enough to know that nothing linked with the life of the working people slips by me. Your difficulties...keep me awake at night.””8 Familiar with the ways of the West, Gierek understood that intellectuals need to criticize, but he felt confident he could confine their complaints to a normal level of academic whining. Although he was the sort of man who avoided making decisions, Gierek believed in his ability somehow to bring Poland through whatever problems it might encounter. Dazzled by what he took to be brilliant success in bringing in foreign loans and raising the standard of living during his first four years in office, he became unwilling to damage his reputation as the builder of a new Poland by provoking confrontations. For him, harassing opposition movements in the late 1970s was simply one of the costs of doing business that could be left to those responsible for it, not a campaign directed from the top to unmask and crush enemies.” KOR was instrumental in two other efforts that promoted the emergence of civil society in Poland during the late 1970s. The first was the Flying University, created in the fall of 1977. In November of that year the Information Bulletin of KOR announced that a number of prominent intellectuals would offer free lectures on such subjects as “The History of People’s Poland” and “Contemporary Political Ideologies” at locations and dates obtainable from KOR. Despite their clandestine quality, the response to these lectures was enormous, and the police took them seriously. In 1979 lectures had eventually to be canceled because of the violent interventions of police goons. Another organization, the Society for Scientific Courses (Towarzystwo Kurs6w Naukowych—TKN), formed by a group of scholars, continued their activities, even publishing academic studies to fill in the “white spaces” in Polish scholarship. The underground journal Res publica (Public Affairs), later the first legal independent publication in Eastern Europe

and today a leading Polish journal, began publishing in 1979 as a direct outgrowth of the lecture series begun by Jerzy Jedlicki, Marcin Krol, and others.®%°

32. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

A second significant initiative was the creation in 1978 of the Founding Committee for the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (Komitet Zatozycielski Wolnych Zwiazkéw Zawodowych Wybrzeza). In 1977 activists in Gdansk attempted to memorialize the workers killed in the riots of 1970 by placing a wreath at Shipyard Gate No. 2 at 2:00 p.m. December 16, exactly seven years after the tragedy. Only about one thousand persons showed up, but the event marked

the beginning of the emergence of the Gdansk shipyard as the premier symbol of worker resistance in Poland. In April 1978 three of the same activists who had organized the memorial boldly proclaimed the creation of a committee to found an independent trade union to defend the “economic, legal and humanitarian interests of the working population.”8! The core group of this new organization provided some of the most important leaders of Solidarity in the 1980s, including Andrzej Gwiazda, Joanna Duda, Bogdan Borusewicz, Alina Piehkowska, Anna Walentynowicz, and, shortly after its formation, Lech Walesa. Two other such committees existed by 1980, one in Katowice, the other in Szczecin. By conviction, many KOR activists considered the working class to be the basis of a stable civil society, although most of its activists, especially the younger ones, did not have explicitly Marxist backgrounds. Still, the very term civil society, as they used it, derived from Hegel and Marx and had overtones of class struggle—the working class in cooperation with the intelligentsia on one side against the “new class” of state and party apparatchiks on the other. Adam Michnik explicitly based his program on “new evolutionism,” the gradual expansion of civil and human rights in Poland,” and “on faith in the power of the working class.” Even the name Robotnik evoked a tradition of socialist newspapers dating back to 1884.8

This orientation of what Michnik called the “lay left” was not, however, the only orientation of oppositionists in the late 1970s, as the existence of Gtos suggested. For example, in March 1977 a rival to KOR emerged, the Movement

in Defense of Human and Civil Rights (Ruch Obrony Praw Cztowieku i Obywatelstwa—ROPCi0O). It presented itself as more nationalistic, more Catholic,

and less leftist in origin. Within a couple of years, ROPCiO split into a number of groupings, such as the Confederation of Independent Poland (Konfederacja Polski Niepodleglej—-KPN), which advocated national independence free of Soviet domination and party dictatorship. KPN accepted the major human rights goals of KOR, but its emphasis on Polish political autonomy potentially put it in direct conflict with the Soviet Union—an extreme position for 1979—in contrast to KOR’s seemingly more realistic policy based on the evolution of civil society.8?

A number of other groupings, often associated with a publication, came into being as well, creating the initial elements of the rich variety of political views that characterized Polish politics after 1989. All ofthese oppositional efforts had their impact, particularly in the symbolic sphere, since they represented the efforts of independent people to assert themselves in a difficult situation, but they did not yet profoundly tap the dissatisfactions of Polish society. Many university students, always the first to be mobilized,

CHAPTER 1+ The New Opposition 33

were involved in opposition, and some of their professors helped them. But only small portions of the intelligentsia were overt oppositionists, although most of them were at least aware of what was going on and of the issues.’ Among workers, however, only those in the major industrial centers were conscious of the underground currents. A small number of activists around papers like Robotnik

informed a fairly broad stratum of workers in the major factories; but among the peasantry, the artisans, the pensioners, and the medium and small enterprises, KOR and the other oppositional organizations were foreign enterprises conducted elsewhere by other people.

POPE JOHN PAUL IIT AND THE POLISH CATHOLIC CHURCH Before 1980 Polish civil society was not mobilized primarily by the intelligentsia or by the working class but by a thunderbolt from abroad that galvanized the entire Polish population, young and old, rural and urban. On October 16, 1978, a puff of white smoke emerging from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel at St. Peter's in Rome announced that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, formerly archbishop of Krakéw, had been selected Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. The Polish Catholic church was the only church in Eastern Europe to main-

tain and even enhance its position in the generation after World War II. The Orthodox churches of Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, steeped in an ancient tradition of “harmonious concert, found ways to live with Communist regimes and became kept institutions, docile before the state, narrow ethically and intellectually, and retrograde in their national parochialisms. The Romanian church particularly profited from its slavish policy when, in 1948, the Romanian government forcibly disbanded the Eastern Catholic church, arrested thousands of its priests and believers, and turned its assets over to the Orthodox church. Forty years of overwhelming pressure so decimated the Eastern Catholics, who numbered 1.7 million in 1948, that in 1990 some seriously questioned whether that faith could be reestablished in Romania.®

In general, Catholics took the opposite tack and vigorously opposed the Communists. In Croatia and Slovakia, however, the church was seriously compromised by its relations with the Germans. When Croatian Archbishop (later Cardinal) Alojzje Stepinac refused to deal with Tito’s new government, he was jailed, thus beginning a hostile pattern of confrontation between the church and state in Croatia that lasted forty years. In Hungary Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty had been a forthright anti-Nazi, but he was also a forthright anti-Communist, and stubborn besides, so he spent not only the war years in prison but many postwar years there as well. After 1956 he took refuge in the American Embassy in Budapest, where he lived for the next fifteen years. Poland was the only East European country where the church found a way

to work with the Communists. Catholicism is a fundamental aspect of Polish

34. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

sensibility, but Poland has always contained a number of other faiths, both in the early modern period and in the interwar period. After World War II, however, with most of the Jews dead and the Ukrainians and Belarusians behind the Soviet border, Poland became almost entirely Catholic. For a few years after the war both the government and the church avoided direct confrontation, but when the Vatican decreed in 1949 that followers of communism should be excommunicated, the Polish government went on the attack, nationalizing church lands and instituting heavy censorship. Rather than marking the end of church independence in Poland, however, nationalization proved to be the beginning of a fluctuating relationship of repression and accommodation, during which the church carved out an independent position. In 1957, as part of his renegotiation of Poland’s social contract, Gomulka reached an agreement with Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski that permitted the church to publish and pursue pastoral activities. Several centers of lay Catholic activity emerged, the first being a “liberal-intellectual” group centered around the Krakow weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly). The philosophically oriented journal Wiez (Bond, as in “bond of friendship”) constituted a second direction, while the more sociologically oriented journal Znak (Sign) was a third. Many associated with these journals and groupings were also members of the Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (Kluby Inteligencji Katolickiej—KIK). Together they constituted a cluster of Catholic writers and activists whose goal “was to cultivate new Catholic lay formations that would promote a religious worldview and conscientious religious practice.” Cardinal Wyszynski also broadened the influence of the church during the 1960s through a vigorous pastoral policy. During a ten-year celebration called the Great Novena, designed to celebrate the millennium of the Polish adoption of Christianity in 966, a replica of the famous Black Madonna of Czestochowa that was blessed by the Pope was taken on a visit to every one of the thousands of parishes in Poland, thus putting a large portion of the population in touch with the Catholic version of antipolitical opposition.’’ Wyszynski believed that only moral renewal would free Poland, and he proved very successful in propagating his messianic vision of romantic Polish nationalism. In 1978 the church had almost twenty thousand priests on the job and more than five thousand students in Catholic seminaries, a number that far exceeded the total in these categories in all the rest of Eastern Europe combined.®8 After 1968 the church began to throw its substantial moral and organizational support toward the opposition. In 1968 cardinals Wyszynski and Wojtyla both protested the way the students had been treated, and in 1970 and 1971 the church spoke out against the atmosphere of governmental intimidation. WieZ, under the editorship of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, opened its pages to opposition writers, who usually wrote under pseudonyms because they were unable to publish in official outlets.89 Mazowiecki followed an editorial policy that stressed moral factors rather than a narrowly conceived Polish national Catholicism. On the occasion of the repressions of 1976, Cardinal Wyszynski condemned the brutal methods

CHAPTER 1+ The New Opposition 35

of the police and characterized contributions to KOR’s relief efforts as “the duty of all people of good will, and especially of a Christian community.’ In the following year Cardinal Wojtyla permitted the Flying University to hold lectures in church buildings in Krakéw, which effectively shielded those sessions from state interference. These linkages prompted Adam Michnik to suggest in 1977 that a close look at the sermons of Cardinal Wyszynski and other documents published by the Polish episcopate showed that the social policies found there, especially those showing concern for the civil rights of workers and postulating a true social and political equality, “are almost totally in accord with, or at least do not contradict, the program of reform conceived by the democratic left.”%! Onto this already well-prepared ground the naming of Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II burst like a joyful bombshell. Poles felt a thrill of pride and stature at the unexpected news. Even Central Committee member and later Prime Minister Mieczystaw Rakowski called it “a collective national intoxication.”9? Almost immediately negotiations got under way for a visit of the new pope to his homeland on the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanistaw, the patron saint of Poland, which was to take place in May 1979. The regime abso-

lutely refused to permit a visit at that particular moment, since in the popular mythology Stanistaw was martyred for opposition to tyranny, but it could not prevent a visit entirely. The government was well aware of the threat John Paul II represented to its diminishing moral authority, as these revealing excerpts from instructions given to teachers in Warsaw who were party members attest: “The

Pope is our enemy....Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor [John Paul II] is dangerous, because he charms everybody, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, i.e. puts on a highlander’s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc.... We must strive at all costs to weaken the Church activities and undermine its authority in the society. In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford any sentiments.” The government’s efforts to manipulate media coverage and otherwise to downplay the pope’s triumphal visit, which took place in June 1979, only further damaged its credibility in the face of the public's overwhelming response. One million people turned out for the first pontifical mass, held symbolically in Victory Square in Warsaw, a spot that resonated powerfully with Polish national history.” In the week that followed hundreds of thousands of ordinary Poles embarked on pilgrimages to holy places at which the pope appeared, and literally millions of people saw and heard the pope give dozens of homilies and sermons in the most historic centers of Polish religious and national life.95 John Paul II stressed the right of the individual to dignity both as a human being and as a worker. In advocating the Christocentric religious themes for which he became known, he made explicit linkages to a Polish national tradition that in the nineteenth century conceived of Poland as the Christ of nations.°* To some his concept of “man in society” sounded very similar to KOR’s notion of an independent society.” The “psychological earthquake,” as Viennese Cardinal K6nig put it, of the pope's visit proved to the party, to the opposition, and to society at large that the

36 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

old language of redemption struck the hearts of Poles with incomparably greater force than the new one.’ One of the most characteristic features of Communist rule was the debasement of ordinary political language. Sovereignty had come to mean loyalty to the Soviet Union; freedom, absence of choice; reform, cosmetic administrative reorganizations; and economic success, standing in lines to buy substandard goods. “We are being drowned in a sea of double talk,” said the program of the Confederation for an Independent Poland. In that atmosphere of falsity the pope’s vibrant Christian rhetoric, delivered in a stylish literary Polish that contrasted sharply with the stereotyped and hackneyed Communist idiom, flew like an arrow to the emotional and spiritual heart of millions of Poles. The very appearance on the streets of these millions surprised many people who had harbored doubts about the regime but felt that they were alone and outnumbered by the state. “Different people found that they were not alone,” as one participant put it.”%

The experience of the pope’s visit proved the accuracy of Havel’s prediction

that anything that touched the hidden sphere of authentic human need would speak to people in a fundamental way. “If a better political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society, Havel said.!°° The antipoliticians had begun the process of creating a civil society in which such a moral change could occur, but John Paul IT’s visit to Poland suddenly jolted millions of Poles to their first awareness that this was indeed a proper sphere in which to begin the hopeless enterprise.

SOLIDARITY Solidarity turned out to be the organizational embodiment of that enterprise. The initial disturbances that led to its creation began, as one might guess, over meat. One of the devices the government introduced in 1976 to bring food prices more in line with costs without raising prices across the board was the opening of commercial shops, where premium cuts of meat were sold at prices considerably higher than those in the state stores. At first only 2 percent of the meat was sold that way, but by 1979 the proportion had crept up to 19 percent. Starting in 1979 the government reluctantly and cautiously began to seek other ways to bring the price of meat to a realistic level. The proportion of meat going to the commercial shops was raised by 2.5 percent, an increase that was actually less than the annual increase since 1976, and prices were adjusted for inflation. The result was a significant de facto increase in the cost of meat. Obviously nervous about the decision, officials introduced the change without announcement, simply permitting a low-ranking bureaucrat to make a statement after the event. To defuse the tensions they were sure this measure would provoke, Gierek authorized local authorities to grant workers who might strike in protest raises and similar benefits on their own authority. This would pacify strikers without involving the central government in a generalized pay raise. Gierek had not given up his idea that the workers could be bribed; he just turned a society-wide inoculation into a

CHAPTER 1 e The New Opposition 37

series of spot cures. Paradoxically, this policy had the unintended effect of insuring that strikes would spread, because only if they went on strike did the workers receive the pay raises. Almost immediately after the changes in meat prices, workers in the industrial area of Ursus near Warsaw stopped work, followed quickly by others.1°! During the next six weeks Jacek Kuron, working out of his apartment with his assistant, Ewa Kulik, kept in touch with factories around the country by telephone and relayed to Western newsmen details on many of the more than 150 work stoppages they eventually counted throughout the country.'°? Most of them were relatively short, since managers were able to settle them with raises of 10 and even 20 percent, but railway traffic was disrupted and production, already shaky, declined. Kuron and the KOR activists did what they could to publicize the increasing breakdown of the regime’s control over society, since the official press confined itself to brief mentions of “temporary work interruptions.” Surprisingly, the government took no preventative measures against KOR, and in the middle of a mounting crisis Gierek even went off to the Soviet Union for his annual three-week vacation.

At the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk organizers were unable to bring workers out in June over the meat issue, but in mid-August the shipyard management conveniently provided a cause by firing Anna Walentynowicz only a few months before her retirement. Since Walentynowicz was a popular crane operator and a well-known activist, her sacking was the perfect pretext for action.!% Robotnik Wybrzeza immediately printed a demand for the reinstatement of both Walentynowicz and Walesa, who had been fired in 1976, adding demands for increases in wages, family allowances at the same level as those received by the police, and a memorial to the victims of the 1970 strikes. Early on the morning of August 14 Bogdan Borusewicz and his small team distributed six thousand leaflets publicizing these demands, and this time the shipyard workers responded. A large crowd gathered in the yard’s main courtyard, where the director of the factory stood up on a bulldozer and promised negotiations if the workers returned

to their jobs. This tactic had worked throughout Poland in the previous six weeks, and it almost worked now. But just at this moment a second man crawled up onto the bulldozer, tapped the manager on the shoulder, and said. “Remember me? I worked here for ten years, and I still feel I'm a shipyard worker. I have the confidence of the workers here.”!°4 Indeed he did. Lech Walesa had arrived, and “with the matchless impudence of a natural leader,” he proceeded to take charge

of the strike. Walesa (pronounced Va-WEN-sa) was a real proletarian. An electrician with six children at the time, he literally spoke the workers’ language, an uneducated

and rough Polish that sounds distinctly lower class to intellectuals. Born and brought up on a poor, minuscule farm where he had to walk four miles to school “barefoot as often as not,’ he left home at age sixteen to become an electrician.!°° After training and military service, he took a job in his home region only to leave for Gdansk at the age of twenty-five after a disappointing love affair. Good with

38 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

his hands and talented at making friends, he signed on as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard. Laying cables in the bowels of ships and living at first in a mildewed workers’ barracks full of drunken and violent young men, he managed to find a sympathetic companion, married, and began to raise a family. Two years after coming to Gdansk, Watesa’s audaciousness and intuitive ability to grasp a situation, as well as his strong sense of what workers wanted and needed, propelled him to a leadership position in the strikes of 1970 and 1971. The shooting of four workers outside the gates of the Lenin Shipyard moved him deeply and the memory of shouting “we will help” to Gierek along with the other workers in 1971 came to embarrass him. Over the next few years he became a tireless organizer. Walesa was not an ideologue or a theorist. He just wanted to get people involved in standing up to the state. Some of his actions were dramatic, such as plastering his jalopy with copies of the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, the most democratic of its day; others were simpler, such as marching to church every Sunday with his growing family. But mostly he simply talked with as many people as possible, even strangers on buses, whom he approached for carfare when released from his periodic forty-eight-hour detentions. Finally in 1976 he was fired from the shipyard, but he continued tirelessly to organize. When others established the Founding Committee for Free Trade Unions on the Coast in 1978, he joined their work. By 1980 he was perhaps the best-known personality in the workers’ section of Gdansk in which he and his family lived. When Walesa first spoke to the crowd of workers on August 14, 1980, therefore, they recognized him and cheered, but two days later, after hours of nego-

tiation and indecision, the strike committee he headed decided, as had many other strike committees elsewhere over the past two months, to accept a substantial pay raise. Walesa announced the end of the strike over the shipyard’s loudspeaker system, and the director told the workers to go home, which most of them started to do. But several women who had been active in the prestrike movement went to the gates of the yard and attempted to stop workers from leaving. Alina Pienkowska grabbed a bullhorn and started shouting at the workers to return. Representatives of strike committees from other factories in the region who had flocked to the Lenin shipyards appealed to Watesa to keep the Lenin Shipyard out in solidarity with them. “If you abandon us we will be lost,” pleaded the leader of the Gdansk public transport garage.!07 Walesa suddenly realized

that the strike should continue.!°’ Rambling around the shipyard on a trolley with Anna Walentynowicz and Ewa Ossowska looking “like a carnival float,” he and the women convinced several hundred workers to stay on, and so the strike continued.!09 Within twenty-four hours Watesa and his colleagues formed the Interfactory Strike Committee (Miedzyzaktadowy Komitet Strajkowy—MKS) with two members from each of the increasing number of enterprises on strike in the Gdansk area. By August 18 some two hundred factories from the region had joined the Interfactory Strike Committee. When a young design student gave the movement a name by producing a striking logo based on the word solidarnosé (solidarity), the Rubicon was crossed.1!0

CHAPTER 1+ The New Opposition 39

The Interfactory Strike Committee quickly formulated a list of twenty-one demands, including the right to strike, selection of foremen on the basis of talent rather than party service, better health care, and more meat. But the first and most fundamental demand was the same one that workers had raised in 1970 in Szczecin: a free and independent union.!!! Gdansk activists such as Joanna Duda, Bogdan Lis, Alina Pienkowska and her husband Bogdan Borusewicz supported this demand and helped formulate it, but some KOR members who were not at the scene found the demand for a free union dangerously radical, even “senseless.” Adam Michnik was preparing to go to Gdansk and tell the workers to abandon such impossible expectations when his arrest prevented him from doing so. “We knew that independent, self-governing trade unions were impossible in a Communist system,” Michnik reminisced later about himself and Jacek Kuron, “but the workers didn’t know. That’s how Solidarity arose, without us and against us, although we always considered it to be our [KOR’s] child. An illegitimate one, you might say.”!!2 Not all the Warsaw intellectuals felt that way. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the noted Catholic editor, put together an appeal signed by sixty-four intellectuals, later joined by hundreds more, placing “the entire progressive intelligentsia’ on the side of the strikers. Arriving in Gdansk late on August 22 to assist the strikers in their negotiations, Mazowiecki and historian Bronistaw Geremek quickly understood the force of the workers’ demand for a free union. Within two days five other Warsaw intellectuals joined Mazowiecki and Geremek, and the Interfactory Strike Committee accepted them as an advisory group.!!>

At first the government hoped to deal with the Gdansk strikes as it had with the others, sending a middle-ranking negotiator to divide the strikers with relatively minor concessions. But the rapid formation of the Interfactory Strike Committee, publication of the twenty-one demands, and the firmness of the workers’ resolve made that impossible, and soon the deputy prime minister arrived. After several days of tense but not always hostile discussions, the final agreements were drafted.!"4

After a brief but bitter internal struggle in which Gierek’s insistence on a negotiated settlement won out over those who wanted to use force, the government proved willing to concede most of the strikers’ goals. On the strikers’ side, the negotiating team also proved willing to make concessions that permitted the government to acquiesce.!5 In the agreement promulgated on August 31, the section in which the Interfactory Strike Committee received the right to set up “new independent and self-governing unions” also included a provision that the unions would “recognize the leading role of the Polish United Workers’ Party in the state.”!16 The phrase “in the state” was artfully designed to be acceptable to the party as supporting its primary position and interpretable by Solidarity as restricting the party's sphere to political activities, leaving civil society open to Solidarity. Hotheads from KOR and KPN, the nationalist group, temporarily upset the applecart when they claimed that conceding the leading role of the party in any sphere made the entire notion of an independent union—and by

40 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

extension an independent society—meaningless. Watesa successfully countered with the argument that it was better to get permission to establish an independent union and to work out its actual role in practice than it was not to get agreement at all. “This is just a matter of words,” he said. “It’s practice, only practice, which will tell how this agreement will work.”17

The Gdansk agreement, along with two others signed at Szczecin and Jastrzebie, became known as the Social Accords. Together they represented a giant failure of Gierek’s policy of stuffing a sausage in the mouth of the workers.1!8

Here was a genuine strike document growing out of a significant experience of self-activization among the coastal workers that put the issue of dignity first. Solidarity’s fundamental demands were independent, self-governing unions, the right to strike, and freedom of expression, while higher wages and improved working conditions came only down the list. “History has taught us that there is no bread without freedom,” the Solidarity program of a year later said. “What we had in mind were not only bread, butter and sausage but also justice, democracy, truth, legality, human dignity, freedom of convictions, and the repair of the republic.”'9 Within days of the accords, Gierek paid the political price for his mistake. On September 5, 1980, Stanistaw Kania, a wily apparatchik with little popular standing, replaced him as first secretary.

SOLIDARITY’S 469 DAYS The coastal strikers had been so involved in the issues of their strike and so cut off by the government from the rest of the country that at first there was no plan to make Solidarity a national movement. But the opening provided by the Social Accords brought dozens of delegations representing strike committees from all over Poland to Gdansk to visit Solidarity’s new headquarters in the Morski Hotel. The question they had to confront was this: Should the Solidarity unions that were popping up everywhere remain locally based or should Solidarity be united into a single union with a national headquarters? Karol Modzelewski argued forcefully that only a national body would have the organizational strength to stand up to the party, whereas partisans of the Gdansk experience held that only if local unions organized themselves autonomously would real democracy be possible. Typically, Walesa spoke on both sides of the issue, but also typically, he found a solution that satisfied both sides. This was to keep the local organizations strong but to form the National Coordinating Commission to coordinate policy on a national level. Late in September the new commission submitted Solidarity’s statutes to the Warsaw Provincial Court for registration as a legal body. When the judge to whose court Solidarity appealed for registration as a legal entity refused to approve the union’s application, Solidarity called a short demonstration strike in which three million workers throughout the country participated, thus using the registration crisis to draw workers from the small and medium-sized enterprises into the movement for the first time. After six weeks of tension Solidarity finally agreed to add the first few sentences of the Gdansk

CHAPTER 1 e The New Opposition 41

accord in which it accepted the leading role of the party in the state to the statutes

as an annex. On this basis the statutes were formally accepted, and Solidarity became a fully legal entity. In a few short months Solidarity had achieved something not only unprec-

edented in postwar Eastern Europe but seemingly impossible. As Kuron put it later, “I thought it was impossible, it was impossible, and I still think it was impossible.”!20 A vanguard party, basing its legitimacy on its claim to be the single true representative of the working class, had permitted the creation of a bona fide workers’ movement outside of its control that commanded the loyalty of millions of Polish laborers. It was, as many observers noted, the first genuine workers revolution in history. But even though Solidarity struck at the very basis of the Leninist party, it was still a partial revolution, in fact hardly a revolution at all, since the revolutionaries self-consciously limited themselves to what they claimed were nonpolitical activities. They not only feared the possibility of Soviet intervention if they threatened the government too directly, but they respected

the antipolitical roots of the movement. Solidarity was a “moral revolution,” as Andrzej Gwiazda put it, not a political one, and the social accords explicitly stated that Solidarity was “not to play the role of a political party.”!2! But politics, after all, is the space in which social power is apportioned. That is what politics is about: power. With actual control over the workers in its hands, it was only a matter of time before Solidarity found itself unable to maintain the fiction that it was merely a labor union.

From the beginning Solidarity sought a partnership with the government, or even a kind of tripartite corporate arrangement, with the church as the third entity. But the government continued to issue important decisions without consulting Solidarity or informing the public, and it continued to make it as hard as possible for the union to achieve its goals, which at first remained relatively limited. The only tool the union possessed was the general strike. During the registration crisis a short strike had proven useful, but its very success momentarily hid from the Solidarity leadership something that European labor leaders had long since learned: the general strike is a cumbersome weapon. If it is used, it runs the risk of failure or of provoking widespread conflict, including perhaps class or civil war, and even, in the case of Poland, foreign intervention. But if it is not used, the intensity of purpose that unites the workers behind the concept begins to decay. For the first six months of Solidarity’s existence the threat of a general strike

remained credible. Actual strikes and the menace of more secured the release of a printer arrested for possession of an embarrassing state document. Wildcat strikes and the threat of a demonstration general strike got the government to roll back its unilateral decision that workers would have to be on the job two Saturdays every month. A general strike warning finally, after a long struggle, induced the regime to permit the registration of Rural Solidarity. In each case tortuous negotiations backed by the threat of strikes resulted in victories for Solidarity, but in each case the victories required important concessions as well.

42 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

After the release of the arrested printer, Solidarity’s leadership had to prevail on angry local unions not to strike; the rollback of the two-Saturday rule meant that Solidarity had to accept a one-Saturday rule; and Rural Solidarity was not registered as a union but only as an association.

Walesa’s role in all this was central and contradictory. Solidarity was extremely democratic. Its discussions were open to the point of chaos; it ran scrupulously fair elections; and its newspaper, when it was finally allowed to appear in April 1981, carried differing views. On the other hand, Lech Walesa was not much of a democrat. Negotiating with members of the government or with Cardinal Wyszynski, often alone, he decided on what concessions could or could not be made without informing even those around him, let alone the rank and file. This may be a highly efficient way to negotiate, and even necessary in some circumstances, but by the spring of 1981 a growing number of Solidarity activists had tired of Watesa’s insistence on maintaining unity rather than acting democratically. As the one who negotiated the compromises, Walesa had to convince his executive committee and the workers in general to go along, something they often did only reluctantly. And, since he realized that Poland’s declining economy could not stand the constant work stoppages that volatile local grievances were causing, this militant union leader spent a sizable portion of his time during the Solidarity period hopscotching around the country trying to convince workers not to strike. This could only go on for so long before Watesa ran into dissatisfaction and opposition from within the ranks. That moment came in March 1981 in Bydgoszcz. When Solidarity activists and representatives of Rural Solidarity, which was trying to achieve legal status, refused to leave a meeting of the local government council that had reneged on its promise to hear them, security forces cleared the protesters out in a manner reminiscent of the “paths of health” of 1976.22 Three participants were badly injured. Many Solidarity activists already were furious at the patent unwillingness of the government to treat the union as a partner, and the Bydgoszcz incident, relatively trivial in itself, pushed them over the edge. Demands for an immediate general strike rained down on the leadership. Trying to avoid an unambiguous confrontation with the government, which he thought would result in bloodshed, Watesa successfully proposed instead a four-hour warning strike and a full general strike four days later if the demands for punishing the offenders were not accepted. On March 27, 1981, as negotiations began, the four-hour strike proved a formidable success, with work stopping almost completely throughout the country. It was a remarkable demonstration of the breakdown of the government’s hold over its citizens. Meanwhile, Walesa closeted himself with Mieczyslaw Rakowski,

the editor of the Warsaw paper Polityka and a Communist who managed to be simultaneously a critic of the regime and one of its most dangerous supporters. After very difficult negotiations, interspersed with an acrimonious central committee meeting, Rakowski and Walesa, who grew heartily to dislike each other, reached an agreement. Only hours before the general strike was to begin Andrzej Gwiazda appeared on television with Watesa at his side and read the

CHAPTER 1+ The New Opposition 43

none-too-satisfactory compromise agreement they had agreed upon. The strike, which had been carefully prepared and for which the union was psychologically ready, was off. In return the government promised to investigate the Bydgoszcz event, to permit Rural Solidarity to operate even if it was not officially registered, and to look at the possibility of releasing some political prisoners. To most Solidarity activists, it looked like the government had prevented the strike by the same old methods of insubstantial promises and insincere assurances, and Walesa faced a pent-up storm of bitter criticism. Karol Modzelewski, one of the movement’s most penetrating analysts, resigned as Solidarity spokesman. Andrzej Gwiazda, whose personal relations with Watesa had been deteriorating, quickly regretted his participation in the compromise and wrote an open letter attacking Walesa for ignoring democracy in the union.!23 Anna Walentynowicz, over whose case the movement had begun, became a critic and was dropped as the Gdansk representative to the National Coordinating Commission.!™4 The original antipolitical purposes of Solidarity created frustration because they conflicted with the actuality of Solidarity’s position in Polish society. The Bydgoszcz agreement was in the antipolitical tradition. It merely sought redress from the government and did not make any structural proposals for change. By this time, however, many Solidarity activists had become convinced by the government’s continued unwillingness to treat the union as a true partner that only political reform would make it possible to achieve the economic gains they all wanted. This was one of Gwiazda’s basic arguments. On his side, Walesa feared that giving up the self-limiting character of the revolution would only result in bloodshed and possibly even Soviet intervention. Pressured by an increasingly intransigent government that itself was under intense pressure from the Soviet Union, Watesa had decided against a general strike in favor of following the antipolitical path originally set out by KOR. “We don't know yet if I was right, or those who took another view,’ he said. “In my opinion the risk was too great.”!25 The Bydgoszcz solution played an important role in another arena too: the relations between Poland and its big brother, the Soviet Union. From the beginning of the Solidarity movement the Soviets consistently urged the Polish leadership to “take decisive measures’ against the union. In the fall of 1980 the Soviets had put together a plan to use military maneuvers as a cover for helping the Poles to impose martial law. Ryszard Kuklinski, a high-ranking Polish officer who sent some 40,000 secret documents to the CIA over a fifteen-year career as a western spy, reported urgently on December 4 that the Soviets were ready to invade four days later.'26 Documents that came to light after 1989, however, show that the politburo had no intention of using Warsaw Pact troops unless the Polish government was going to impose martial law, which the Poles did not feel prepared to do yet.!27 In the spring of 1981, a second tense moment surfaced as Soviet leaders brought Kania and Jaruzelski to a secret meeting in Brest and attempted to browbeat them into action. The two Poles were in fact making plans for martial law, but they were not ready to act. With the lessening of tension that the Bydgoszcz agreement produced, the Soviets backed off.128

44. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Always looking over its shoulder to Moscow, the Polish party also found itself pressured internally by reform elements.!29 A movement of “horizontalists,”

so called because local organizations coordinated their reform ideas without conferring with higher party organs, spread rapidly. In April 1981 it began to attract the attention of the Western press, which praised it, and the Soviet press, which reacted strongly against it, both for the same reason: the horizontalists threatened the higher party apparatus. The pattern of unanimous voting at party plenums began breaking down, and local party units expressed their dissatisfaction by replacing about 50 percent of their first secretaries in the first half of 1981. Party leader Stanislaw Kania tried to straddle the fence between impatient reformers and irritated hardliners but, in the end, without success. In September and October, Solidarity took a major step toward becoming

a true political movement, although it continued to deny such an intent. In a lengthy two-part convention, it adopted a program that, if implemented, would destroy the Polish United Workers’ party. The “October Program” retained some

aspects of self-limitation. It remained opposed to private ownership of large industry, specifically rejected the creation of political parties, and steered clear of calling for a truly independent Poland. Its program included calls for social ownership rather than state ownership of the means of production; private ownership in agriculture and small business; a second chamber in the legislature to accommodate nonparty needs; and free local elections. “Pluralism of views and social, political, and cultural pluralism should be the foundation of democracy in Poland’s “Self-Governing Republic,” the program asserted. Walesa was reelected to lead the union to the realization of these goals, but his relatively slim 55 percent margin suggested that the elements pushing for confrontation were becoming stronger. Just after the end of the Solidarity national congress early in October, the Polish United Workers’ party held its congress. Consistent with the new spirit of democracy provoked by the horizontalists, in July the party had changed its electoral rules to add secret balloting and to require more than one candidate for party positions. Under these new rules, the relatively uncontrolled elections to the party congress in October returned “remarkably few officials and apparatchiks,” making the congress, in the opinion of one observer, “largely uncontrollable. °13° Angered by the Solidarity congress and frustrated by the declining economic situation, delegates indulged in a wholly uncharacteristic surge of criticism of Kania. When, on the third day, the central committee adopted a sharply critical resolution, Kania interpreted it as a vote of lack of confidence and resigned. Into his place stepped General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Minister of National Defense since 1968 and Prime Minister since February 1981. In Jaruzelski the party found what it wanted: a strong leader but not a Stalinist one. One of the first steps Jaruzelski took was to meet with Lech Watesa and the

newly appointed primate of Poland, Cardinal Glemp. It is almost certain that none of the parties in this meeting expected much from it, but there were many who hoped that party, church, and people could achieve a tripartite partnership

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 45

of some kind. But the time for partnership with Solidarity remained almost a decade in the future. In fact, it was almost at the very moment of meeting with Glemp and Walesa that Jaruzelski decided to put the lid back on Polish society by declaring a “state of war,’ the Polish equivalent of martial law.13!

THE STATE OF WAR The confrontation, when it came, was not unexpected, but it was a surprise nonetheless.!32 By the end of November an increasingly intransigent government

faced an increasingly agitated Solidarity. At the factory level local unions had begun demanding the removal of party units from the factory premises, and at the national level leaders such as Jacek Kuron, who had been counseling caution from the beginning, began to advocate the creation of an alternative political party. To make the tension worse, the economy was rapidly sliding downhill. Debt had increased to over $25 billion, and servicing now took up almost all the hard currency produced by exports, which were down in any event. Industrial production dropped 19 percent from the previous year and total national production dropped 12 percent, declining for the third consecutive year. The standard of living was now worsening, having declined to its 1974 level.!33

By early December, Solidarity leaders felt a confrontation was coming, but they had difficulty imagining its potency and extent. Despite repeated but vague warnings from Walesa that they underestimated their opponent, most Solidarity activists did not differentiate between Solidarity’s power as a representative of society and the government's power as the wielder of the forces of social control. They were right that Solidarity was much stronger than the government in the minds of most Poles. They were wrong that this made the government incapable of acting.

On the cold evening of December 12, 1981, the National Coordinating Commission of the Solidarity union was meeting in Gdansk for the second day of discussions on how to respond to Jaruzelski’s apparent determination to provoke a confrontation. Only a week before, the government had secretly recorded a disputatious Solidarity meeting at Radom, the most inflammatory portions of which it repeatedly broadcast to make the case that Solidarity was plotting the overthrow of the state. Most of the participants in the Gdansk meeting anticipated that the Sejm, scheduled to meet three days later, on December 15, was about to agree to emergency measures, and they were discussing how to respond—with a general strike, perhaps. Despite the tenseness of the situation, few of the assembled activists believed themselves in any imminent danger. When the meeting broke up at midnight, most of them simply went home or took their chartered bus back to the hotel. A few of them, including Zbigniew Bujak, Wiktor Kulerski, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, and Bogdan Lis, for various reasons did not go home immediately. They turned out to be among the few who escaped the roundup. The lightning strike by Jaruzelski’s forces on the night of December 12-13 was well planned, professionally executed, and almost completely successful.!34 Just after midnight security forces surrounded the Gdansk hotel in which Solidarity

46 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

leaders were staying and took them all into custody. Throughout the country the security forces arrested activists in their apartments (including Walesa), searched trains (where they missed Frasyniuk, whom a friendly engineer had let off the train in time), cut off telephone and other communications, and patrolled city streets with an intimidating show of force. “How long can the [government's] hand extended in accord be met with a clenched fist?” Jaruzelski asked in an unconscious reversal of the actual state of affairs.135 Declaring that “our country stands at the edge of an abyss,” Jaruzelski advised the nation that civilian power had passed to the Military Council for National Salvation (Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego—W RON), which consisted of twenty-one high-ranking officers. He reimposed full censorship, reestablished the six-day work week, placed coal mines under military control, and created military courts empowered to impose lengthy jail sentences for such offenses as spreading false information.!% Despite their equivocal experience earlier in the year, Solidarity leaders still considered the general strike their ultimate and most devastating weapon. With a majority of Poland’s work force as members, including many in the military and the police, they had incorrectly assumed that the government would not mount a direct attack on them because the security forces would not obey. If they did obey, the union would proceed to shut the country down. Thus they were caught almost completely unprepared for the government's action. They had not taken steps to secure their printing presses, for example, or their monetary resources. No shadow network of underground links and safe houses had been arranged,

and few preparations of any kind had been made at the local and shop level. Consequently, the large number of vigorous strikes that burst out around the country had an episodic character and were put down relatively easily by a government that proved willing and able to use whatever force was necessary, including shooting a number of miners at the Wujek mine.!37 Worst of all, Solidarity was “not mentally prepared. Nobody imagined that this seemingly weak government would prove strong enough to turn the police...or the army...on us.”!38 Wrapped up in its own internal politics, which had become increasingly contentious, and confined bya style of thinking that bound it to acts of the working class, Solidarity proved momentarily unable to meet the challenge of overt force.

NOTES 1. Leszek Kotakowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 1-2. 2. Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage, 1992), 9. 3. Amore sophisticated but far less well-known critique of the new bureaucratic elite (the new class) in the Soviet Union is Claude Lefort, “Totalitarianism without Stalin,” in his The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed.

John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986), 52-88. The article was first published in 1956.

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 47 4. Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1967, 22nd printing as corrected), 69.

5. Peter Raina, Political Opposition in Poland (London: Poets & Painters Press, 1978), 82-95. The complete text of the Open Letter may be found in Revolutionary Marxist Students in Poland Speak Out, ed. George Lavan Weissman, trans. Gerald Paul (New York: Merit Press, 1968).

6. See Gerson Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). 7. Mihailo Markovic, “Marxist Philosophy in Yugoslavia: The Praxis Group,” in Mihailo Markovic and Robert S. Cohen, Yugoslavia: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism (London: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1975), 37. Markovic later became a nationalist supporter of the architect of Serbia’s post-Communist disaster, Slobodan MiloSevic.

8. For a useful discussion of the Praxis philosophers, see Aleksandar Pavkovic, “Two Thaws in Yugoslav Philosophy,” in Glasnost in Context, ed. M. Pavlyshyn (London: Berg, 1990), 69-82. 9. Jaromir Navratil, et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998) contains not only 140 key documents on the politics of the Prague Spring, but a chronology, a full bibliography, and many useful commentaries. 10. Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 153.

11. Party leader Antonin Novotny had gone to some trouble to insult the Slovaks earlier in the year by returning a gala gift from Matica Slovenska, the Slovak cultural organization, as “unacceptable” (William Shawcross, Dubcéek: Dubéek and Czechoslovakia, 1968-1990 [London: Hogarth Press, 1990], 154). 12. Portions of Dubéek’s speech with Novotny’s response can be found in Navratil, The Prague Spring, 13-17. See also Pavel Tigrid, “Czechoslovakia: A Post-Mortem,” Survey 73 (Autumn 1969): 133-164. 13. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizd ala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 98. In his article of April 4, 1968, Havel said, “Therefore I see the only genuinely consequential and effective route to the idea of democratic socialism...is a revitalized model of a two-party system, one that corresponds to a socialist social structure” (Havel, Open Letters, 30). 14. Dennison Rusinow, “Anatomy of a Student Revolt,’ American Universities Field Service, Southeast Europe Series, vol. 15 (1968), nos. 4 and 5. For a shortened version of these see “Anatomy of a Student Revolt,” in Dennison Rusinow, Yugoslavia: Oblique Insights and Observations (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2008), 62-104. 15. Philosophy students and faculty continued a sustained series of protests and confrontations until in 1975 seven professors of philosophy were removed from active teaching. 16. Miodrag PeriSsic, conversation with author, January 16, 1992.

17. Both Kolakowski and Bauman began their careers as committed communists. Kolakowski criticized the party as early as 1956 and was expelled, while Bauman, who had held the rank of major in a political security unit, renounced his membership in the Polish United Workers’ [i.e. Communist] Party in January 1968.

48 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 18. At the time, some of the Jewish students who were expelled did not understand the anti-Semitic rhetoric as such, but saw it instead as simply another example of the lies and provocations of a corrupt regime. Today, however, the Polish 1968 is widely interpreted as an event in the history of Polish anti-Semitism. In the census of 2002 only 1,133 persons out of a population of almost 40 million were willing to identify themselves as Jewish (Irena Grudzinska Gross, “1968 in Poland,” paper given at a conference sponsored by the Cold War International History Project entitled “Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia,” Washington, D.C., November 7, 2008). Ironically, some young people actually envied the Jews because they were permitted to leave Poland (comment to author by Krzysztof Lazarski, December 7, 2008). 19. David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 46-47. Zygmunt Bauman agrees that the Polish intelligentsia “flirted” with the political leadership (Joanna M. Prebisz, Polish Dissident Publications: An Annotated Bibliography |New York: Praeger, 1982], quoting an article by Bauman in Krytyka from 1978, 77).

20. See his speech to the court prior to being sentenced to three years in prison in December 1968 (Raina, Political Opposition in Poland, 179). Kuron taught his scouts

that a true Communist was “a man who fights for social justice, for freedom and equality, for socialism.” Kuron and Modzelewski, who had been released from jail just in time for the March events, found themselves returned to prison for an additional three and one-half years at the same time Michnik was sentenced, along with many other activists. 21. Andrzej Friszke, “The March 1968 Protest Movement in Light of Ministry of Interior Reports to the Party Leadership,” InterMarium 1, no. 1 (1997) published by the East Central European Center of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. Raina reports expressions of sympathy from three factories in Wroclaw, Warsaw, and Krakow, but in comparison with the outbursts to come in the 1970s and in 1980 they were minor (Raina, Political Opposition in Poland, 140). 22. For a detailed discussion of the events of 1970-1971, see Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Goodwyn’s book expands Laba’s insights into a full-scale social interpretation of post-World War II Polish history. For critiques of these two books see Michael Bernhard, “Reinterpreting Solidarity,’ Studies in Comparative

Communism 24, no. 3 (1991): 313-330; and Timothy Garton Ash, “Poland After Solidarity,” New York Review of Books (June 13, 1991). Bernhard criticizes some of Laba’s interpretations but calls his reconstruction of the strikes of 1970-1971 “the standard account.” Goodwyn, Bernhard writes, “will read like a fairy tale to anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with...Solidarity” (330). 23. Elements taken from the speech of Jozef Cyrankiewicz, December 17, 1970, quoted by Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 63. On the same page Laba quotes Cyrankiewicz as saying in 1956, “Every provocateur or madman who dares to lift his hand against the power of People’s Poland will have that hand chopped off.” 24. These figures come from a party report accepted by the central committee in June 1983 and published in Nowe Drogi in October of that year (Keesing’s, 32,799). For many details on these events, see Keesing’s, 24,389. 25. Later the myth was spread that Minister of Defense General Jaruzelski had not been a party to the killings and had announced to an emergency session of the politburo

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 49 that “Polish soldiers will not fire on Polish workers.” Laba convincingly demonstrates this widespread and influential story to be a piece of very successful disinformation. In 1983 Jaruzelski said to a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor that “workers who strike are not Polish” (Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 88-90 [quotation on p. 90)). 26. Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 68. 27. Neal Ascherson, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 104.

28. Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,’ American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April, 1999): 410, citing a Radio Free Europe report of April 19, 1971. For a richly contextualized account of the Lédz strike, see Kenney, 399-425. 29. Zbigniew M. Fallenbuchl, “The Strategy of Development and Gierek’s Economic Maneuver, in Gierek’s Poland, ed. Adam Bromke and John W. Strong (New York: Praeger, 1973), 60.

30. “What kind of communist society is it that has no sausage?” Nikita Khrushchev once remarked (quoted in Mark Franklin, Khrushchev [London: Pelican, 1966], 148). Goodwyn argues that it was not just the Communists who believed that workers were preoccupied with “stomach issues” but the entire Polish intelligentsia (Breaking the Barrier, 98). 31. Robert W. Dean, “Gierek’s Three Years: Retrenchment and Reform,” Survey 20, nos. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 1974): 66. 32. Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 43; and Kazimierz Poznanski, “Economic Adjustment and Political Forces: Poland since 1970,” International Organization 40, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 291.

33. Martin R. Myant, Poland: A Crisis for Socialism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982), 69.

34. Zbigniew M. Fallenbuchl, “The Polish Economy in the 1970s,” in East European Economies Post-Helsinki (Washington, D.C.: Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress, 1977), 835. 35. Poznanski, “Economic Adjustment and Political Forces,” 281. See also Mario Nuti, “The Polish Crisis: Economic Factors and Constraints,” in Crisis in the East European

Economy: The Spread of the Polish Disease, ed. Jan Drewnowski (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982). 36. Myant, Poland: A Crisis for Socialism, 108. James R. Thompson reports that by the

end of the 1980s only 54 percent of the Perkins engines produced in the MasseyFerguson production facility left the factory rated “satisfactory” on the first try, and that the mean time to failure of the seventeen different models of tractors Ursus produced ranged from 80 to 150 hours, far below Western standards. To suggest how poor a reputation Ursus had in Poland, Thompson notes that Polish farmers “choose to buy even Russian tractors in preference” (“A Glimpse at the Dark Side of Socialist Industrial Planning,” Sarmatian Review 12, no. 1 [January 1992]: 104). 37. Vaclav Havel, “Letter to Gustav Husak,” in his Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 31. 38. Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 23, 65, 68. Keith John Lepak points out that despite Gierek’s

initial success in courting economic ties with the West, especially with West Germany, in fact as the decade progressed the Polish economy became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union (Prelude to Solidarity: Poland and the Politics of the Gierek Regime [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988]).

50 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 39. Adam Michnik, “A New Evolutionism,” in Letters from Prison, trans. Maya Latynski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 146. 40. Leszek Kotakowski, “Hope and Hopelessness,” Survey 17, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 46. 41. Leonid Brezhnev, “Speech to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party (November 12, 1968),° Current Digest of the Soviet Press 20, no. 46 (1968): 3-5. 42. This is the title of a Kuron article from the 1980s (see Ted Kaminski, “Underground Publishing in Poland,” Orbis 31, no. 3 [Fall 1987]: 328). 43. Mihaly Vajda, The State and Socialism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 2-3. Vajda’s introduction provides a superb sketch of how this student of Lukac’s lost his faith in Marxism but retained his belief in freedom. 44. Havel, Living in Truth, 29. 45. Michnik, Letters From Prison, 86. 46. Havel, Living in Truth, 90. 47. George Konrad, Anti-Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 120. 48. Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 181. 49. Havel, Living in Truth, 57. 50. Havel’s famous article by this name was inspired by a request from Adam Michnik. Dissident leaders from Poland and Czechoslovakia had started to meet clandestinely at the Czech/Polish border in the late 1970s and at a meeting in 1978 Michnik asked Havel for an article for a collection of essays he was planning. “The Power of the Powerless” was the result. See Michnik’s interview with Havel, “After the Velvet, an Existential Revolution?” Salon, November 20, 2008. http://www.salon.eu.sk/article.p hp?article=801&searchPhrase=velvet%20revolution (accessed October 6, 2009).

51. Vaculik’s speech appears in Dusan Harnsik, Writers against Rulers (New York: Random House, 1971), 181-182. 52. Konstanty Gebert, “An Independent Society: Poland under Martial Law,” Alternatives 15 (1990): 359, quoting his own work originally published in February 1982. “What

the dissidents wanted to do was to erect their own ramparts and to live, behind them, a communal life worthy of free individuals” (Gyérgy Bence, “Social Theory in Transition, Social Research 57, no. 2 [Summer 1990]: 252).

53. Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1992), 104. 54. Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 186. Havel’s most important work not mentioned previously are Letters to Olga, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), and To the Castle and Back, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Random House, 2007).

55. Quoted by Bernard Wheaton and Zdenék Kavan, The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1988-1991 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 116. See also Tim West, “Destiny as Alibi: Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel and the ‘Czech Question’ after 1968,” The Slavonic and East European Review 87, no. 3 (July 2009): 401-428.

56. President Jimmy Carter's policy of supporting human rights, announced in his inaugural address, had an impact too. In the Soviet Union Andrei Sakharov praised Carter for being the first head of state to announce “an unambiguous commitment to the international defense of human rights” (quoted by Michael Scammell, “The Prophet and the Wilderness,” The New Republic, February 25 [1991], 34). 57. Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe: Part II, Hearings before the

Subcommittee on International Political and Military Affairs of the [House] Committee on International Relations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 123.

CHAPTER 1 « The New Opposition 51

58. The twenty-two persons arrested included members of other groups as well. See Timothy W. Ryback, Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 141-148. Ryback reports that at the trial, the Plastics’ attorney countered the government's charge of vulgarity by reading a 1922 letter of Lenin’s in which he said “bureaucracy is shit.” Nonetheless, four of the most prominent musicians were convicted. They received sentences of from eight to eighteen months for “disrespect of society” and for being “filthy” and “obscene.” 59. Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 128. 60. H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 212. For useful documents on Charter 77, see Vilem Preéan, Svetlana Savranskaya, and Thomas Blanton, eds., Charter 77 After 30 Years: Documenting the Landmark Human Rights Declaration (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 213, 2007), http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchive/NSAEBB/NSAEBB213/index. htm (accessed November 24, 2008)

61. For a vivid description of the apprehension and arrest of the chartists, see Eda Kriseova’s chatty biography, Vaclav Havel: The Authorized Biography, trans. Caleb Crain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 108-121. The negative reaction of the regime was almost overburdened with irony. “[H]istory teaches us,” said President Gustav Husak, “that all campaigns [such as Charter 77’s] based on lies and lacking links to the life and consciousness of the people will collapse,” just as his regime did thirteen years later (John Keane, Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts [New York: Basic Books, 2000], 249). For theoretical background, see Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Tucker gives a thumbnail sketch of the wide

varieties of interpretations of Havel, with references, on pp. 4-5. For a positive interpretation not mentioned by Tucker, see James E. Pontuso, Vaclav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004). 62. Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 5. 63. The reemergence of the notion of civil society as a functional term of political analysis is closely linked with the rhetoric of the Solidarity movement and its supporters on the left in the West. See Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992) and the work of John Keane: Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political Power (London, Verso 1988); and Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 64. See Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, 64-66. 65. Adam Michnik, “A New Evolutionism,” in his Letters From Prison, 135-148. 66. Jan Jézef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers Defense Committee in Poland, 19761978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 34.

67. Stanislaw Baranczak, Breathing under Water and Other East European Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 46. 68. Robert Zuzowski, Political Dissent and opposition in Poland: The Workers Defense Committee “KOR” (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), argues that KOR’s most impor-

tant contribution was to legitimate open opposition in contrast to clandestine activities.

52 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 69. Lipski, KOR, 44-45 and 64. 70. Since the acronym for the society thereby became very awkward (KSS “KOR’”) I will continue to refer to the organization simply as KOR. 71. The Poles have an earthier term for samizdat: bibuta, which also means toilet paper. 72. For a brief history of Petlice by its founder see Ludvik Vaculik, “A Padlock for the Castle,” Index on Censorship 3, no. 89: 31-33. 73. In 1985 research by the Center for Journalism in Krakow estimated that by 1980 one

in every four Poles had read an underground publication and about two hundred thousand persons read bibuta regularly (Bernhard, “Reinterpreting Solidarity,” 319). 74. The “a” is added to the acronym to turn it into the word nowa (pronounced “nova”), or “new.”

75. Such as Wydawnictwo Konstytyciji 3 Maja and Wydawnictwo Glos. The latter astonished contemporaries with its publication of photographs (black and white, of course), a considerable technical achievement for a clandestine press at the time. 76. Nuti, “The Polish Crisis,” 37. 77. Ted Kaminski, “Underground Publishing in Poland,” Orbis 31, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 314. 78. Quoted by Keith John Lepak, Prelude to Solidarity: Poland and the Politics of the Gierek Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 165. 79. The opposition felt the same way. “We took [the searches, the arrests, and the spells in prison] in our stride as occupational hazards, disturbing, yes, but by now commonplace” (Lech Walesa, A Way of Hope [New York: Henry Holt, 1987], 103). 80. Interview with Damian Kalbarczyk, February 19, 1992. 81. The initial declaration of April 29, 1978, appeared in Survey 24, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 93-98. 82. Michnik, Letters from Prison, 144. 83. For the initial programs of these two organizations see Raina, Political Opposition in Poland, 468-496. See too Zuzowski, Political Dissent in Poland, ch. 6 (“KOR’s Relations with Other Dissident Organizations”).

84. Bernhard has been “able to establish the identity of six hundred or so activists involved in KOR initiatives in twenty localities” (“Reinterpreting Solidarity,” 320). Zuzowski, Political Dissent in Poland, lists 38 members of KOR itself (263).

85. Fiona Tupper-Carey, “The Post-Revolutionary Conflict between the Romanian Uniate Church and the Romanian Orthodox Church,” paper presented at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, December 14, 1990. 86 . Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish Opposition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 50. One of the strengths of these publications was that they used what might be called normal language, rather than the stiff jargon of regime pronouncements. 87. For the Great Novena and the general enthusiasm it provoked, see Osa, Solidarity and Contention, chapter 2.

88. Andrzej Micewski, Cardinal Wyszynski (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 407.

89. For a useful description of the intellectual confrontation between Marxism and Catholicism in Poland as well as a discussion of the main Catholic groups (Pax, Znak, and Wiez), see Norbert A. Zmijewski, The Catholic- Marxist Ideological Dialogue in Poland, 1945-1980 (Aldershot, Great Britain: Dartmouth, 1991). Jacek Kuron, for example, appeared in WieZ as M. Gajka (88).

CHAPTER 1 ¢ The New Opposition 53 90. Raina, Political Opposition in Poland, 408. 91. Michnik, L’Eglise et la Gauche, 100. 92. Tad Szulc, Pope John Paul II: The Biography (New York: Scribner, 1995), 290. 93. KOR’s weekly, Biuletyn Informacyjny, published these instructions on April 30, 1979. Quoted by Jan Kubik, “John Paul II’s First Visit to Poland and the Collapse

of the Official Marxist-Leninist Discourse,” Harvard University, Department of Sociology, Center for Research on Politics and Social Organization, Working Paper Series (1989), 8. See also James Ramon Felak, “Nation, Church, History: John Paul II’s First Pilgrimage to Poland, June 1979,” paper delivered at the AAASS convention, New Orleans, November 2007. 94. So named by the Communists in honor of their victory in World War II, it is now called Pilsudski Square. 95. Fora detailed summary of the Pope’s visit, see George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Cliff St. Books, 1999), 301-325. 96. “It is impossible, therefore, to understand and evaluate without reference to Christ the past contribution of the Polish nation to the advancement of the human person and the person’s very humanness,” The Pope Speaks 24, no. 3 (1979): 268. 97. Grzegorz Bakuniak and Krzysztof Nowak, “The Creation of a Collective Identity in a Social Movement: The Case of “Solidarnos¢’ in Poland,” Theory and Society 16 (1987): 413-416. 98. Timothy Garton Ash argues that the pope’s visit was the symbolic beginning point of the events that created 1989 (The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague [New York: Random House, 1990], 133). 99. Wojciech Roszkowski, interview, February 21, 1992. 100. Havel, Living in Truth, 71. 101. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 3:4 ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, originally published 1983), 36. 102. “Kuron’s apartment—which throughout the entire existence of KOR served as a club, a hotel, a press office, and a coordination center—began to resemble a madhouse,” recalled Jan Jozef Lipski (KOR, 425).

103. For an excellent review of Walentynowicz’s remarkable career see Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 29-65. 104. Garton Ash, Solidarity, 43. Neal Ascherson, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting

Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 147, has the quotation this way: “Remember me? I gave ten years to this shipyard. But you sacked me four years ago!” For an eyewitness account, see Stan Persky’s interview with Jerzy Borowczak, “At the Lenin Shipyard,” in The Solidarity Sourcebook, ed. Stan Persky and Henry Flam (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982), 73-80. 105. Ascherson, The Polish August, 132. 106. For Walesa’s description of his childhood and early life see his autobiography, A Way of Hope.

107. Ascherson, The Polish August, 148. 108. For Walesa’s authorized account, see Walesa, A Way of Hope, 121-122. Kristi S. Long argues that Alina Pienkowska was the one who made the actual suggestion to Walesa that the strike should continue (We All fought for Freedom: Women in Poland’s Solidarity Movement [Boulder: Westview Press, 1996], 30, 49). In any event, Pienkowska played a key role, along with Anna Walentynowicz, Henryka

94. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Krzywonos, and Ewa Ossowska, in turning the situation around (Penn, Solidarity’s Secret, 56-57). 109. Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution, 45. 110. Jerzy Janiszewski, “Solidarnosc [sic]: Design for a Logo,” in Persky and Flam, eds., The Solidarity Sourcebook, 79-80. 111. Laba holds that this shows it was the workers’ experiences in Szczecin in 1970 and 1971 that provided the crucial innovations of 1980, not the work of KOR. But Bronistaw Geremek points out that when the delegation from Szczecin arrived in Gdansk in August 1981 it consisted of three men about twenty-five years of age who came seeking suggestions on how to proceed in Szczecin. Geremek says that the Szczecin experience became known to him only in 1984, at which time the similarities between it and the Solidarity strike “astounded” him. In 1980 no one knew about that experience, he says, and no one talked about it. On the other hand, Geremek believes that Walesa “was formed in the Robotnik milieu” (interview, February 21, 1992). The direct influence of Robotnik Wybrzeza on events in Gdansk and the organizational work of KOR member Borusewicz seems clear enough.

112. From a discussion in 1988 quoted by Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of AntiPolitics, 77.

113. The five were Bogdan Cywinski, Tadeusz Kowalik, Waldemar Kuczynski, Jadwiga Staniszkis, and Andrzej Wielowiejski. 114. Jadwiga Staniszkis characterizes the first meeting of the negotiators as follows: “a peculiar half-relaxed atmosphere and gentle, ironic tones predominated. One of the reasons was that the experts on both sides... were more or less members of the same Warsaw society.... We could very easily have changed places (if only our political attitudes were taken into account). This attitude made the negotiations easier’ (Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution, ed. Jan T. Gross [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 55). 115. For example, one of the controversial issues was what words to use to describe

the union: “free” (wolny), “self-governing” (samorzgdny), or “independent” (niepogledly). The advisory group of intellectuals said “free” would raise problems, since it would suggest the union could join the International Labor Organization, which the Soviets probably would not permit. Therefore they recommended “independent.” Watesa said why not “free and independent.” Finally they replaced “free” with “self-governing,” and the government accepted this. Geremek cites this as an example of the collegial give-and-take relationship that existed between the advisory committee of Warsaw intellectuals and the Interfactory Strike Committee of workers (interview, February 21, 1992).

116. The agreement is reprinted in many places, including Andrzej Paczkowski and Malcolm Byrne, eds., From Solidarity to Martial law: The Polish Crisis of 1980-81, A Documentary History (Budapest and New York: Central European Press, 2007), 70-80. 117. Ascherson, The Polish August, 164. 118. As one poet put it early in 1981: The times are past When they closed our mouths With sausage Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution, 345. During the 1980s, the Jaruzelski regime introduced price changes in a more rational way than their predecessors had, but

CHAPTER 1 ¢ The New Opposition 55 the attitude that workers primarily wanted material goods died hard. In 1984 David S. Mason interviewed Minister for Trade Union Affairs Stanislaw Ciosek, who told him “The interests of the working class are uniform; they all want the same thing—an improvement in the standard of living” (“Poland’s New Trade Unions,” Soviet Studies 39, no. 3 [1987]: 501).

119. Solidarity’s Program of October 16, 1981, from Poland, 1981: Social Renewal, ed. Peter Raina (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 326.

120. Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 68, quoting Stewart Steven, The Poles (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 176.

121. Gwiazda used the phrase in his open letter to Lech Walesa after the Bydgoszcz crisis (Garton Ash, Solidarity, 292). On the same page, Garton Ash quotes Father Jozef Tischner as follows: “Solidarity is a huge forest planted by awakened consciences.... Revolution is an occurrence in the realm of the spirit.” 122. For an eyewitness account with a surprise ending see Radek Sikorski, Full Circle: A Homecoming to Free Poland (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 72-88. 123. Persky and Flam, Solidarity Sourcebook, 171-174, which includes Walesa’s reply. 124. Walentynowicz’s accusations at the time that Walesa was firing independent activists and putting Communist agents in their place received support in some circles when after 1989 it was revealed that as a young man he had “signed something”

under interrogation by the secret police. Walentynowicz ended up a right wing Catholic nationalist convinced that “the entire parliament was in the pay of George Soros” (Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution, 378-379). 125. Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution, 172. 126. For Kuklinski’s amazing career as a spy, see Benjamin Weiser, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). Spy story aficionados will find Weiser’s description of how Kuklinski got his famous December 4, 1980, communication to the west worth

reading (221-225), and will find his exfiltration story even more nerve-racking (272-289).

127. Mark Kramer, “Colonel Kuklinski and the Polish Crisis, 1980-81,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 (Winter, 1998), 48-59. For an excellent discussion of American intelligence on this crisis, see Douglas J. MacEachin, U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, 1980-81 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 17-88. MacEachin concludes that “it is hard to find fault with the vigorous actions taken by the U.S. administration” (81). President Carter had gathered European support in case of a Soviet intervention, and had issued a stern public warning against it. 128. See MacEachin, U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, Part II; and Mark Kramer, “Soviet Deliberations During the Polish Crisis, 1980-1981,” Special Working Paper No. 1, Cold War International History Project, April 1999. 129. See Werner G. Hahn, Democracy in a Communist Party: Poland’s Experience since 1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 130. Hahn, Democracy in a Communist Party, 81. 131. About the time Jaruzelski took over party leadership, the Solidarity news agency

published an accurate report that special units had been formed to put down Solidarity and that in two months they would be used (Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution, 244). Kuklinski writes that a final decision had been made at least by the end of October, although as late as December 10 the Soviet politburo seemed unclear

56 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN whether Jaruzelski would actually go ahead (Ryszard Kuklinski, “Suppression of Solidarity,” in Between East and West: Writings from Kultura, ed. Robert Kostrzewa [New York: Hill & Wang, 1990], 91; “Document 81: Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo

Meeting, December 10, 1981,” Paczkowski and Byrne, From Solidarity to Martial Law, 446-453). Apparently East German leader Erick Honecker had suggested martial law to the Soviets as a possible solution as early as May 1981 (RFE/RL Daily Report, December 13, 1991). 132. Including to the United States government. For a discussion of why this could be, given the plethora of information at its disposal, see MacEachin, U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, 211-244.

133. Zbigniew M. Fallenbuchl, “The Economic Crisis in Poland and Prospects for Recovery,” in East European Economies: Slow Growth in the 1980s (Washington, D.C.: Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 1986), 365 (technically the 12 percent drop was in domestic net material product); Keesing’s, 31,390. 134. Bogdan Borusewicz says, “The campaign that authorities presented as organized and super-efficient was, in reality, a chaotic struggle,” but the same can be said for all human endeavors. The rapidity and success of the imposition of the operation speaks for its relative efficiency (Maciej Lopinski, Marcin Moskit, and Mariusz Wilk, Konspira: Solidarity Underground, trans. Jane Cave [Berkley: University of California Press, 1990], 23). 135. Robert Maxwell, ed., Jaruzelski: Prime Minister of Poland (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985), 28-30.

136. The Soviet Union provided no military support for the imposition of martial law. In fact, in a politburo meeting of December 10, an earlier decision not to dispatch troops was unanimously confirmed. At least one contemporary report suggests Jaruzelski was hoping for such support, but probably only in case the operation did not go smoothly, which he thought likely (“The Anoshkin Notebook on the Polish Crisis, December 1981,” translated and annotated by Mark Kramer, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 |[Winter, 1998]: 19). MacEachin agrees

with this interpretation, although in later years Jaruzelski consistently denied he expected or wanted Soviet military help (U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, 238). 137. In 1992 three members of the special forces who had been at Wujek were indicted for murder. 138. Wladistaw Frasyniuk, quoted by Lopinski, Moskit, and Wilk, Konspira, 11.

CHAPTER 2

a,

The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis

Gees collapse under the weight of martial law ended the third major attempt of East Europeans to escape from the Stalinist embrace in the direction of pluralism, and the least violent. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a bloody event. More an emotional outburst of rage against the Soviet Union than a calculated effort to achieve an attainable goal, the Hungarian Revolution erupted suddenly after only a few months of relatively superficial oppositional activity, although its passion clearly bespoke deep hostility both to Russians and to the Soviet system. When, in the first days of the revolution, Soviet troops temporarily withdrew, Hungarians could not restrain their hunger to reject Soviet tutelage and to turn westward. A few days later the Red Army returned and began shooting, and the Hungarians shot back. This was revolution such as Delacroix might have painted it—a bare-chested Imre Nagy leading his people over the

barricades to liberty. In good romantic fashion, the result was not victory but death—a heroic death, but death nonetheless. Twelve years later, the Czechs and Slovaks, having learned, in a sense, from the Hungarian experience, explicitly denied they were trying to replace the Soviet system. They claimed to be merely reinterpreting the style with which socialism

presented itself, emphasizing the humane rather than the mechanistic side of Marx. More than a year of economic reforms and months of vigorous oppositional activity preceded the surprise denouement. When the invasion came it was not only Soviet troops but also Warsaw Pact soldiers who invaded, and they did not enter shooting; neither did the Czechs and Slovaks shoot back, although they did offer bitter passive resistance. Despite the emotions it raised and the hopes it engendered, the Prague Spring was a peculiarly Czech revolution—sensible, solid, and, when finished, justified with ironic satisfaction as an honorable defeat.

The Solidarity movement was even longer in preparation and much longer in execution. The Poles, having learned the impossibility of replacing their Socialist regime from the Hungarian experience and of reforming it from the

57

58 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Czechoslovak experience, decided instead to bypass it. Independent society would be a democratic sphere unconnected with the all-encompassing state. More cautious than their predecessors and more willing to compromise, Solidarity’s selflimiting revolution was the most measured of the three. Perhaps because of this it managed to bring most of the working population of Poland into its fold and to go a long way toward creating the self-governing independent society it set as its goal. Solidarity was a much shrewder, a much more subversive, and a much more powerful movement than either the Hungarian Revolution or the Prague Spring,

and it provoked a milder form of intervention. Solidarity was put down not by foreign invasion but by Polish police—self-repression of the self-limiting revolution. During the martial law period Poles had more leeway for opposition than Hungarians did in the first years after 1956 or the Czechs and Slovaks had for many years after 1968. Solidarity was a soft revolution, but that softness was its greatest strength because it educated a generation of activists and it gave almost the entire nation a taste of running its own affairs. Eventually, this is what made the breakthrough in Poland in 1989 possible.

The three great revolutionary moments of the post-Stalinist period all occurred in countries that were traditionally Catholic (or Protestant—but not Orthodox), historically part of one of the Germanic empires, and economically linked to the rest of Europe by traditional trade patterns.! Southeastern Europe, which was traditionally Orthodox, historically related to the Ottoman Empire, and relatively new to economic development, experienced no such outbursts.? Neither Bulgaria nor Romania produced significant dissidence, let alone the emergence of an independent society, although scattered moments of violent rage occasionally pierced the placid surface of Romanian life. The reason for this is not to be found in some sort of historical determinism through which semi-oriental countries are fated to follow a path of underdevelopment but in specific postwar arrangements and in the policies pursued by the leaders of the two countries. Neither Romania nor Bulgaria had a lengthy tradition of democracy or of capitalist relations, but both achieved independence in the nineteenth century, created parliamentary systems, and by the interwar period began at least a modest turn toward industrialization.3 In these ways they did not differ substantially from Greece, which, despite pockets of extreme wealth and a few major cities, was no better governed than Romania and Bulgaria up to World War II and not more prosperous either. But Greece, which had been a client state of Great Britain since the nineteenth century, returned to England’s protection in 1944, whereas Bulgaria and Romania, both closely linked with Russia from the nineteenth century, remained in the Soviet sphere after World War II. After Stalin’s death, neither Bulgaria nor Romania experienced breaks in their leadership as Poland and Hungary did, and neither experienced significant internal reforms. In Bulgaria, the Stalinist Vulko Chervenko lost his position as party leader in 1956, but he remained an important political force until Todor Zhivkov consolidated both party and state leadership in his own hands

CHAPTER 2 « The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 59

in 1962. In Romania, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a convinced Stalinist who vigorously opposed Khrushchev’s relative moderation, stayed in power until his death in 1965, when his protégé Nicolae Ceausescu succeeded him. Zhivkov and Ceausescu stayed in power right up until the fateful months of November and December 1989. All of these leaders, from the early ones through Zhivkov and Ceausescu, firmly believed in the fundamental Stalinist tenets of collectivization, industrialization, and democratic centralism (i.e., strict party control). Within a decade of Stalin’s death both Romania and Bulgaria had pushed their agricultural collectivization drives to completion and had embarked on successive five-year plans that stressed heavy industry. The huge metallurgical combines at Galati (Romania) and Kremikovtsi (Bulgaria) could compete with Socialist enterprises anywhere for their waste of resources, propaganda excesses, and wretched inefficiency. Neither the Bulgarian nor the Romanian party had any patience with euphemisms such as “United Workers’ party” or “Socialist Workers’ party.” They called themselves simply the Bulgarian Communist party and (after 1965) the Romanian Communist party. The men who governed these two countries for twenty-five years and more had similar backgrounds and careers. Both Todor Zhivkov and Nicolae Ceausescu were of peasant origin and received their education primarily in the Communist opposition rather than in formal schools. Zhivkov may have completed secondary school, whereupon he became a printer; but Ceausescu left school at age eleven to become a shoemaker’s apprentice and, eventually, supposedly, an electrician, although he was not very handy.‘ Both suffered arrest and spent the war years in their own countries, either in prison, in the case of Ceausescu, or in Bulgaria's small partisan movement, in the case of Zhivkov, emerging from the war years with impeccable revolutionary resumes. Ceausescu had been a prison mate of Gheorghiu-Dej and became his protégé, whereas Zhivkov became party boss of Sofia. At the time they achieved full control of their countries, neither man had ever left his native land, and both understood the world primarily in terms of the simplistic catechisms they had learned as young Stalinists. Their rise to the top of their parties is prima facie evidence that they both had considerable political talent, but neither man was particularly charismatic. The curiosity is that they remained in power for so long and led their countries in such different directions.

ZHIVKOV’S QUIET BULGARIA There is not a great deal to be said about the development of Bulgarian politics under Todor Zhivkov. By a constant process of reorganization and reshuffling, by pitting occasional challengers against each other, and by demoting upstarts,

Zhivkov maintained his personal power and sustained the authority of his party for more than thirty years, more than an entire generation. His only two tricky moments—and neither of them threatened the party's hegemony—were a rumored army coup in 1965 and a purge associated with the dismissal of Boris Velchev in 1977. In foreign policy Zhivkov hewed to the Soviet line.

60 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Economically, Zhivkov was an inveterate reformer. Bulgaria conducted major reform campaigns in 1963, 1965, 1968, 1970-1971, 1978, 1979, 1982, and 1985-1987. But since for Zhivkov “reform” meant rationalizing and perfecting centralized planning, none of them led to anything. Indeed, the word “reform” lost all its meaning for ordinary citizens, and came to be seen as one of the many

meaningless terms the regime used to justify its meddling with their lives. In general, the Bulgarian economy remained closely tied to that of the Soviet Union, which was Bulgaria’s largest supplier of fuel and ore, its most consistent buyer

of machinery (such as forklift trucks and electronics equipment), and a major market for its agricultural products. Bulgaria’s moderate success in producing relatively advanced industrial products was made possible by the importation of technology and raw materials from the West, particularly from West Germany, which in turn led to the accumulation of a significant foreign debt. By the end of the 1970s debt service was taking approximately 40 percent of Bulgaria’s hard currency earnings. Other East European countries found it difficult or impossible to solve their debt problems, but at the end of the 1970s Bulgaria began paying off its obligations and by 1982 had succeeded in halving its debt. Aggressive

selling of agricultural goods throughout the world helped in this endeavor, but the primary method of redressing the Bulgarian balance of trade was to resell at the world price oil imported at favorable prices from the Soviet Union. Hard currency oil profits and energy supplies for domestic use were the most tangible way that Bulgaria profited from being the Soviet Union’s most loyal follower.

Collectivization was successful enough in Bulgaria that in the 1960s agricultural production increased at a rapid rate, although growth fell off during the 1970s, thanks in part to the creation of agroindustrial complexes. These huge, overadministered agricultural enterprises employed tens of thousands of farm workers and covered twenty to thirty thousand hectares of land.’ The idea was to put food processing facilities, and eventually even research and technical facilities, under the roof of the cooperative that actually grew the crops, thereby increasing specialization, upgrading technical proficiency, and improving production. The agroindustrial complexes suffered the normal bureaucratic inefficiencies, but in general they were successful enough to make Bulgaria one of the best fed countries in Eastern Europe and to permit Bulgaria to earn foreign exchange by exporting agricultural products. Despite the chronic shortage of housing typical of centrally planned systems, the Bulgarian standard of living moved upward noticeably in the period of Zhivkov’s rule. Very little oppositional activity of any kind developed in Bulgaria, either in the pre-1968 period characterized elsewhere by revisionist Marxism or in the post-1968 period characterized elsewhere by antipolitical opposition. No major strikes disturbed Zhivkov’s Bulgaria, and no samizdat literature or oppositional tracts rippled the subsurface of public life. Even rock and roll music was late and pallid in Bulgaria.* Zhivkov did not achieve this quiescence solely with repression, as Ceausescu did, although the Bulgarian secret police kept a close eye on society. Over the course of its rule, the Communist party maintained about one

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 61

hundred detention camps and in its early days imprisoned tens of thousands of people, often for complete innocuous reasons.’ By the 1980s, however, a slip

normally did not mean Soviet-style punishments. When philosopher Zhelyu Zhelev’s book Fascism, which was an obvious Aesopian piece, appeared in the 1970s, this future president of Bulgaria had to live in his family village for a while, but when he returned to Sofia under the protection of Liudmila Zhivkova, Todor

Zhivkov's eccentric daughter, he took up a position in the Institute for Culture, where he pursued a restrained career as a philosopher. In another case, when in 1968 authorities banned Radoi Ralin’s Hot Peppers, a collection of short poems,

pointed aphorisms, and clever drawings, because it contained, among other things, a cartoon of a pig whose tail looked suspiciously like Zhivkov’s signature, both Ralin and the book’s cartoonist, Boris Dimovski, suffered “invisible conspiracies’ that made their lives difficult, but within a few years they were able to write and publish again.’ But these were exceptional cases. In general little or no opposition existed in Bulgaria. One of the most common explanations for this seeming anomaly is the Orientalist argument that Eastern Orthodoxy is morally passive, emphasizes form rather than substance, and therefore does not provide suitable cultural soil for initiative and risk taking. In this view Bulgarian culture is uncongenial to the kind of ethical stands taken by Charter 77 or the drive toward independent society characteristic of Catholic Poland.’ This view is analogous to the explanation given by many people in the Balkans that their various failings are attributable to the legacy of four hundred years of Ottoman occupation.!° There may well be some truth in these assertions, but they are so widely accepted that they have come to stand in the way of more ordinary analysis that would be offered for other countries.

One reason for the weakness of the Bulgarian opposition was that the Bulgarian Communist party had a long, indigenous history and was not perceived as a foreign imposition. The Bulgarian party came into existence in 1891 and had its own Bolshevik-like wing (the Narrows) as early as 1903. Many Bulgarian intellectuals therefore continued to believe Communism was a good

idea and attributed whatever dissatisfactions they might have felt to faulty institutions or leaders.!! Another reason for passivity was the relatively positive feelings Bulgarians have toward Russians. Since the Russian army achieved independence for Bulgaria in the nineteenth century, Bulgarians did not look on Russians with the same kind of hostility as did other East Europeans, and since Soviet troops entered Bulgaria only briefly at the end of World War IJ, Bulgarians did not have the same opportunities for developing a hatred of the invader as occurred elsewhere. A change in social stratification also helped the Communists in Bulgaria.

A very high proportion of the postwar Bulgarian intelligentsia were men and women who emerged from poor backgrounds and had the postwar changes to thank for their rise to position. This was not an accident, because class criteria were used to ration education in Communist Bulgaria, thereby almost wiping out

62 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

a generation of middle-class students in favor of ones from peasant or proletarian backgrounds. Those who benefited from this policy, including many who were

not intellectuals, had every reason to support the system that had given them their chance to prove themselves. Without a strong set of traditional linkages with the West but with a stake in the system, the new Bulgarian intelligentsia often saw itself as peripheralized from European concerns, both geographically and culturally. The isolation in which Zhivkov kept the intellectuals during his years only added to this sense of detachment. In consequence, they often did not look upon the activities of oppositionists elsewhere as something that concerned

them.! Certainly an important reason for the lack of overt opposition in Bulgaria was the political skill of the leader himself.!3 Western authors have tended to patronize Todor Zhivkov, characterizing him as “modest and well-meaning,” or “colorless and plodding,’ or “sluggish and inept.’“ This is in contrast to evaluations of Janos Kadar, who was admired for his clever policies that kept Hungary calm and satisfied after the devastation of 1956. Kadar was of peasant origin too, and with a proletarian youth, but by 1970 he had transmuted himself, in legend at least, into a practical and gifted leader. Zhivkov, on the other hand, fell into a category that is difficult for educated Westerners to understand and to esteem—the sly Balkan peasant. When he read pronouncements or speeches written for him by others, his speech was faltering and wooden; but when he spoke off the cuff he had a common touch that suggested his real talent, which was manipulating people. Zhivkov did not permit intellectuals particularly large material gains, although some stars lived well. Instead he cultivated and flattered them. He met periodically with writers, actors, academics, and students; liked to tell self-deprecating stories about his own lack of education; and found ways to flatter and to reward individuals at the right moment. Zhivkov used this special talent to minimize opposition without introducing particularly brutal methods, while at the same time the Bulgarian economy inched modestly forward. As Maria Todorova puts it, “Zhivkov managed to implement a successful policy of dividing or corrupting the intelligentsia while not creating martyrs and saints.”'5 No workers’ strikes, no samizdat publications, and no overt dissidence disrupted Bulgarian public life, and the credit, if it be that, goes to Todor Zhivkov. Of course, at the same time he deserves credit for the rest: a cult of personality, coupled with luxurious living for himself and an egalitarian wage system for the rest of the country; a dullness in public life; serious and ignored pollution; nationalist outbursts against Yugoslavia and Turkey; a xenophobic internal policy against national minorities; closed borders; and all the other dreary markers of “real existing socialism.”

MEGALOMANIA IN ROMANIA Bulgaria fared better than did its neighbor Romania, where Nicolae Ceausescu came to power in 1965. Insofar as Ceausescu was known at all in 1965, he was

CHAPTER 2 « The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 63

perceived as the most loyal and energetic servant of his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. That postwar leader had embarked Romania on a quite different course than the one followed by Bulgaria, which was always a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union. After Soviet troops finally left Romania in 1958, GheorgiuDej took advantage of the conflict between China and the Soviet Union, as well as the Cuban missile crisis, to turn Romania away from direct dependence on the Soviet Union. He began to reorient Romanian trade a bit toward the West,

and he encouraged historians to rekindle traditional interpretations of the Romanian past.

Most important, in 1963, after several years of controversy, he rejected Nikita Khrushchev’s plan to integrate the economies of the CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance—the economic association of the Soviet bloc).

Khrushchev’s plan would have made Romania responsible for supplying the Soviet bloc with agricultural goods and raw materials in return for which it would receive machinery and industrial products from the other members of CMEA. Such a policy would have prevented the construction of the great steel mill that all Stalinists considered the sine qua non of modernity and independence. Gheorgiu-Dej, Stalinist to his core, saw Khrushchev’s integration plans as yet another Soviet effort to thwart Romania, whose future he believed he had assured by signing an agreement with an Anglo-French consortium to develop a huge steel mill in Galati. A series of anti-Soviet pinpricks, such as publishing a reinterpretation of the Soviet invasion of 1944 that gave most of the credit for “liberating” Romania to Romanian rather than to Soviet forces, prepared the way for the publication in 1964 of a “Statement of the Romanian Workers’ Party.” “No party has or can have a privileged place,” the statement said, “or can impose its line and opinions on other parties....It is the sovereign right of each socialist state to elaborate, choose, or change the forms and methods of socialist construction. !6 This independent line marked Romania as the maverick of the Soviet bloc in Western eyes. No matter how despotic Ceausescu later became, the United States and others clung to the vision of a nonconformist Romania until the late 1980s. When Nicolae Ceausescu came to power, then, he inherited a party whose

independent stands toward the Soviet Union had created a modest but genuine popularity for itself. Not only were many people proud of the renewed Romanophile direction of national politics, but the economic picture seemed hopeful. The devastation of the postwar years had been repaired, a reasonably successful collectivization process was complete, and the device of placing new industries relatively evenly around the country rather than simply in the urban centers shielded the peasantry from the worst side effects of industrialization.” Ceausescu began his rule by claiming to be in favor of increased democracy, socialist legality, and cultural openness. He encouraged letter writing to newspapers, staged huge conferences of workers, suggested increased material incentives for the peasants, called for a “confrontation of viewpoints” to improve science, and promised more intellectual diversity.18 From 1968 to 1972 he even permitted

64 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

private businessmen to lease state restaurants and similar services for their own profit. Western observers who had begun to look at Romania in a more favorable light were particularly impressed when in 1967 Romania was the only bloc country not to break with Israel during the Six Day War and even more so in 1968 when Ceausescu refused to permit Romanian troops to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The abrupt ending of the Prague Spring had the opposite effect in Romania from the one it had in east central Europe. Instead of convincing the intelligentsia that there was no hope of reforming socialism, Ceausescu’s stirring indictment of the invasion of Czechoslovakia convinced many Romanian intellectuals that Ceausescu was opening up new possibilities for Romania. Many of them joined the party for the first time. In that same year some young writers tested the new sense of hope by putting their own candidates forward for leadership of the writers union, demanding an end to censorship and calling for more democracy in publishing. But the hopes of the late 1960s came to nothing. Not only were the young writers unsuccessful in 1968, but three years later, after a visit to North Korea and China, Ceausescu closed the door on his early promises.!9 The “July theses” of 1971, which called for a tightening of discipline in cultural affairs, began the process whereby the Ceausescu regime took on that peculiar version of unreality that characterized it over the next twenty years. Nicolae Ceausescu was never personally popular, except perhaps momentarily at the beginning of his rule. A rigid and authoritarian man, he had none of the folksy charm of Todor Zhivkov and little of the flexibility of Janos Kadar. He read his speeches with a slight stutter and in a monotone, punctuating his talk with weak little arm movements and often emphasizing the wrong word. Without any spark of spontaneous warmth, Ceausescu began early to manufacture demonstrations of public support through a variety of artificial means. One strategy was to visit the countryside often, theoretically to hear popular concerns and to mingle with the people. In actuality he paid not the slightest attention to the real concerns of the population, from which his increasingly regal manner isolated him, and the vivacious demonstrations of support that always greeted his appearances were rigidly choreographed. By 1980 party organizers were putting together massive spectacles of adulation that involved literally millions of active participants in what one observer called “a permanent ceremonial enacted by the entire country in front of a single spectator.”2° The central device in what Katherine Verdery calls Ceausescu’s symbolicideological strategy of social control was the creation of a cult of personality to end all cults of personality.2! At the beginning of his rule the media men-

tioned other public figures prominently, but by 1973 the main news item in every television broadcast or newspaper became the daily rounds of President of the Republic Nicolae Ceausescu, as he was always referred to, and his wife, Comrade Academician Doctor Engineer Elena Ceausescu. The rise of Elena to equal billing in the daily barrage of effusive praise was particularly irritating to

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 65

Romanians.”? If Nicolae’s self-promotion was difficult to stomach, at least he had seized power on his own merits. Elena, on the other hand, was despised for using her husband’s position to advance her own pretensions. Supposedly an engineer, although it was difficult to find anyone who had known her as a student (the only

proof that has been found documenting her educational achievements was one showing her completion of the fourth grade),?3 she ruthlessly promoted her own quite fraudulent reputation as a great scientist and came to be a formidable power in her own right. By the mid-1970s she was being characterized as an “outstanding activist of party and state, eminent personage of Romanian and international science.’24 A less charitable opinion was that of Mark Almond, who described her as a combination of Lady Macbeth and Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet scientific charlatan.25

Even the praise of Elena pales before the fatuous adulation heaped on her husband.26 As Walter Bacon has pointed out, this adulation typically contained five elements: “praise of the leader, evidence of his theoretical genius, proof of his paternalistic relationship with the masses, reminders of his heroic revolutionary past, and demonstrations [usually in the form of ever-upwardly arching graphs] of his leadership’s accomplishments.”2”? By the 1980s Ceausescu had become

the “torchbearer among torchbearers,’ “unique as a mountain peak,” and even “our famous lullaby trill.” His brilliance was legendary, his figure unique and impressive, his personality passionate and fascinating, and his moral endurance fabulous—all qualities tempered, of course, by his “saintly modesty.”28 While one may speculate about the needs that drive a man to revel in such

absurdities or about the functional rationality of deifying the leader in an undeveloped society, it is clear that two basic and incompatible ideas underlay Ceausescu’s worldview: the primitive and one-dimensional Marxism that he had learned as a semieducated revolutionary in the 1930s and an equally primitive and self-serving nationalism. If Stalinism was the reductio ad absurdum of the idea that human reason could transform the world, as suggested in the Introduction, then Ceausescuism is the reductio ad absurdum of Stalinism. Heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and strict social controls enforced by an aggressive and sizable security police constituted the pillars of his socialism. Above all, Ceausescu believed in the virtues of a proletarian and revolutionary party, which must take the lead in building a “multilaterally developed socialist society.’ The party's duty was to extend its control over as many aspects of public and private affairs as it could. In Poland the successes of KOR and Solidarity in mobilizing civil society made independent society a realistic candidate for political partnership. In Romania, by contrast, the party’s constant invasion of public space after 1971 left no room for an independent society to emerge. Even within the party Ceausescu left no free space, because he insisted that party affairs be run only by sycophants whose loyalty to him was outspoken and abject. By placing their deadening hands on every public and private act, this “sycophantocracy, as Bacon calls it, squeezed all spontaneity and vivacity out of Romanian public life.

66 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

From his first speeches in 1966 and 1967, however, Ceausescu did not rely primarily on Marxism to mobilize Romanians and to legitimate his rule. He took the nationalist card originally dealt him by Gheorghiu-Dej and raised it, as he did so many other things, to new heights of vulgarity, linking the ideas of nation, party, and leader into one indissoluble conception of Romania. Since every nationalism

privileges certain cultural practices over others, control of the historical narrative is always a point of contention. Ceausescu took close personal control over the Romanian narrative, often presenting the “correct” view of the nation’s past in major speeches. He maintained that continuity and unity were the bedrocks “of any theoretical, ideological and political educative activity” of the party. Continuity referred to the questionable thesis that a direct line of historical transmission linked the Dacians, who inhabited Transylvania in pre-Roman times, and the Socialist Republic of Romania. Between the Dacians and the present, every major Romanian historical figure had added his special quality to the Romanian character, which became most fully represented in the preeminent historical figure of Nicolae Ceausescu. Staged meetings between himself and important kings from the Romanian past were only the most comic among the devices Ceausescu used to demonstrate his unimpeachable genealogy as the most fully developed realization of the Romanian spirit. Reports of these encounters never mentioned that Ceausescu was actually meeting an actor, and not, say, Michael the Brave. Paintings showed Ceausescu radiant in a semicircle of the ancient rulers. Unity referred to the constant longing for unification into one state that allegedly had motivated Romanians from Dacian times. This characteristic may have needed particular stress because, in fact, the three main Romanian lands had never been firmly united until the twentieth century. In any event, after World War II the Romanian Communist party became “the continuer of the centuries-old struggle of the Romanian people for the country’s independence, for the formation of the Romanian nation and of the unitary national State, for the acceleration of social progress.”3° Romania's entire history had to be promoted as a two-thousand-year-long aspiration to be united under the direction of the party and its leader. Katherine Verdery argues that Ceausescu and his party did not impose their exaggerated nationalist discourse on Romania simply as a way of justifying their rule. Rather, the party was successful in finding a discourse “inscribed in and emanating from many quarters of Romanian society’ and that therefore constituted an already existing field of contention it could seek to control.3! The measure of the party’s success in using this strategy was that even its opponents, when offered a minimal opportunity to raise their heads, tended to conduct their arguments using nationalist symbolism. This had the effect of confirming the terms that the state had already appropriated, so that by their very use of nationalist categories the potential oppositionists lent subtle support to the centralizing character of the regime. In fact, however, there was little opposition in Romania. Norman Manea, one of the few oppositionist writers, has said that after Ceausescu came to power

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 67

some writers tried to write nonpolitically, but they became so involved in the details of how to do this that they lost track of their literary aims, becoming preoccupied instead with politics rather than esthetics and thereby entering into the cage provided for them by the regime.*2 The only oppositionist who became even moderately known in the West was the novelist Paul Goma.%3 After several years

of difficulties with the regime, in 1970 Goma attempted to publish a novel in which he seemed to model an unsympathetic character on Elena Ceausescu. This marked the end of his public career. In 1977 he circulated a letter of solidarity with Charter 77, but he could gain the signature of only two ethnically Romanian intellectuals (a number of others signed, but they were Romanians of German, Hungarian, or Jewish descent who had been denied emigration visas). Goma was arrested, interrogated, and forced to emigrate. One of the reasons so little opposition emerged in Romania may have been that Romania, like Bulgaria, boasted few powerful Marxist thinkers. This may have been a function of the extremely small number of leftist intellectuals existing in Romania before the war, so that when the Communists came to power they boasted no prominent thinkers of European stature.34 In places like Poland and Hungary it was often just these figures who provided the intellectual basis for a revisionist Marxist opposition before 1968. Even opposition after 1968 in those countries can be understood as benefiting from the failure of the revisionists, against whom the antipoliticians could react.35 Michael Shafir argues, therefore, that the presence of the pre-1968 revisionists who were “capable of formulating demands in an ‘elite penetrative’ jargon” was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for inducing change in Eastern Europe.*6 Since these did not exist in Romania there was little movement toward reform before 1968, and no failed revisionism to react against with an antipolitical strategy after 1968. Shafir suggests three other possible explanations for the lack of an opposition in Romania: an Ottoman tradition of dissimulation; the intellectuals’ willingness to enter into nationalist discourse, and the lack of restiveness within the working class.

There is another factor: the extraordinarily thorough penetration of Romanian society by the infamous Securitate, Ceausescu’s huge and ubiquitous secret police.37 Foreign travelers to Romania were painfully aware of its presence—friends interrogated after social visits, film taken from cameras locked

in suitcases inside locked hotel rooms, menacing interviews with insinuating officials. It has been said that a good political machine thrives on the visibility of its rewards and the certainty of its punishments. Ceausescu’s punishments were usually not ultimate—he killed only a few of his opponents—but they were certain: harassment, demotion, transfer, house arrest, and prison.38 The Securitate penetrated deeply into the fabric of Romanian society, creating a pervasive atmosphere of fear by continually testing the loyalty of every citizen in the country and intimidating all but the most foolhardy. “The reason why most attempts at opposing the Romanian regime were dissipated in improvised, transient, isolated explosions,’ Manea writes, “was the virtual impossibility of establishing the very foundations of genuine social dialogue.”2°

68 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Romania's economy suffered from the same deficits as the other centrally planned economies, but with two significant and unusual twists. In the 1960s Romanian officials became alarmed about the country’s declining birth rate, which by 1965 had dropped below the point needed to sustain a growing labor force. Other East European countries facing a similar problem in the 1960s expanded their social benefits programs to encourage women to bear children. Hungary and East Germany in particular coupled economic reform with positive incentives to encourage births.4° But Romania took a perversely original and unorthodox approach: in 1966 it decided to increase the labor force by banning abortions.#!

Abortions had become much easier throughout Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union reliberalized its laws late in 1955.42 Since contraceptive devices, while not illegal, were impossible to obtain in Romania, with the legalization of abortion there in 1957 it became the only readily available method of birth control. Thus the number of abortions surged from about 130,000 in 1958 to 1,115,000 in 1965, or more than four abortions for every live birth, the highest rate reported up to that time for any country in the world.43 Ceausescu found this unsatisfactory. Both he and his wife had a strong puritanical streak that they periodically pitted against drinking, smoking, and frivolity in general. The Ceausescus insisted on a carefully measured and controlled organic diet and watched their weight carefully. This puritanical streak probably influenced their decision to ban abortions. The instantaneous impact of the ruling in 1966 was the near doubling of the country’s birth rate in one year. But the new rule did not halt illegal abortions, or even some legal ones, which were still permitted in cases of incest and threats to the mother’s health. By the mid-1970s the rate had crept back to almost one legal or illegal abortion for every live birth, a higher rate than in any other East

European country.‘4 Within a decade the birth rate declined into the range it had been in 1960, and by the mid-1980s it was back where it had been when the restrictions were put in place. The costs in human terms of Ceausescu’s natalist policy were enormous, especially in the 1980s, when many mothers, unwilling or unable to care for their unwanted children, simply abandoned them. The discovery after 1989 of orphanages filled with thousands of wretched children living in medieval filth was the single most horrible revelation to come out of any formerly Communist country in Eastern Europe. And it goes without saying that Ceausescu’s brutal policy had no effect whatsoever on Romania’s economic growth.

The second peculiar aspect of Romanian economic development under Ceausescu revolved around Romania’s main natural resource, oil. The Romanian oil fields were the largest in Eastern Europe outside the Soviet Union and had provided the basis for a strong Romanian oil industry throughout the twentieth century. In the 1970s, however, output began to decline due to well exhaustion at a time when Romania, pursuing its emphasis on heavy industry, had greatly increased its refining capacity. Where to get the oil? The logical place would have

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 69

been the Soviet Union, but because of Romania's independent policies from the 1960s, the Soviets refused to sell Romania oil at the preferential prices that other members of CMEA enjoyed. The solution was to cultivate oil-rich countries such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Algeria. During the 1970s trade with these countries increased significantly, until by 1980 it consisted of more than one quarter of all Romanian foreign trade (trade with CMEA countries and with the developed world each consisted of about one-third of Romanian foreign trade). At the same time, however, the world price of oil skyrocketed in the oil crises of 1973 and 1978. Trying to maintain its import schedule, Romania ran up a foreign debt of $10.2 billion by 1981, forcing Romania to become the second East European country (Poland was first) to reschedule its debt. At that point, however, Ceausescu made another idiosyncratic move—he decided to pay off all Romania's foreign debt by 1990. This economically unsound decision was quite consistent with the narrow moralism with which he propagated his natalist policies, with the pride with which he emphasized Romania’s uniqueness, and with the provinciality of his self-image. Romania was not going to have to depend on anyone. This draconian decision could only be implemented by dramatically cutting imports and greatly increasing exports, even if it meant impoverishing his own people, and in the 1980s it made Romania the most miserable and despised country in Europe, with the possible exception of Albania. Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were surely the least attractive among a none-too-attractive rogues’ gallery of East European Communist leaders, and they fell into an entirely different category from the intellectually and morally vigorous leaders of the East European opposition. But in a strange way Ceausescu had his affiliation with the revolutions of 1956, 1968, and 1980 too, for he was also seeking a way to lead his country out of the Soviet grasp. Unfortunately for the Romanians, however, he traded an evolving Soviet domination that eventually produced Gorbachev for a megalomaniacal version of inward-looking totalitarianism that crushed the human spirit and left Romanians with few social resources to cast off the evil thing when an opportunity finally presented itself. In 1968, when Ceausescu achieved popularity in Romania by refusing to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, one Romanian prophetically observed, “We have been so preoccupied with the danger of Soviet occupation that for all practical purposes we have pre-occupied ourselves.”45 In escaping the domination of a foreign power, Romanians fell headlong into the grasp of a more vicious homegrown version of that very domination.

THE FIRST WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ STATE ON GERMAN SOIL When the West wrote off Bulgaria and Romania after World War II, the Communist regimes of those countries were able to establish such strong control over their societies that the Soviet Union never had to come to their rescue. The Soviet interventions in 1953, 1956, and 1968 came not in southeastern Europe but

70 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

in east central Europe. Despite these interventions, in two of the Soviet clients, Poland and Hungary, an independent society emerged that eventually challenged the party’s exclusive right to rule. But in the other two cases, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the interventions succeeded in imposing or reinforcing restrictive regimes that maintained a social control quite comparable to that maintained by Ceausescu and Zhivkov. Unlike their Balkan counterparts, the leaders of the two conservative regimes of east central Europe were educated men. Gustav Husak was a rather brilliant Communist lawyer of middle-class origins from Slovakia, and Erich Honecker received a substantial education, albeit more in party schools than in ordinary educational institutions. But the regimes they presided over were sufficiently similar to those of Zhivkov and Ceausescu that Charles Gati has lumped all of them together as the “gang of four, the backward-looking neo-Stalinists who continued to apply the failed lessons of the 1950s well into the 1980s.4¢ The most obvious problem that faced the German Democratic Republic was summed up in the first word of its name: German. Created in 1949 by the Soviets

as a counterpoise to the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and deprived of formerly German lands to the east, the GDR always suffered from an inferiority complex as the semilegitimate poorer relation of its western counterpart. Whereas the Federal Republic presented itself simply as “Germany,” the best the German Democratic Republic could do was to present itself as “the first workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil.” For twenty years the West German

governments of Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democratic successors encouraged this sense of inferiority by preventing diplomatic recognition of East Germany by the international community. Shortly after West Germany became a fully recognized sovereign state in 1954, its foreign minister declared that the Federal Republic would break relations with any state that granted diplomatic recognition to East Germany. Since it was already clear that West Germany was on the verge of a rapid economic resurgence, this so-called Hallstein Doctrine diplomatically isolated East Germany until the 1970s.4” Isolation assumed a physical dimension in August 1961, when, alarmed at the large numbers of its citizens working in West Berlin and leaving for West Germany, the East German government constructed a massive wall through the center of Berlin. More than twenty-five miles long and twenty feet high in many spots, the Berlin Wall succeeded in slowing the flow of emigrants, but it failed to prevent the stagnation of East German population growth and was a grotesque public relations disaster in the bargain. Between 1949 and the construction of the wall roughly 2.7 million East Germans, or approximately one-seventh of the country’s population, registered as refugees in West Germany, whereas in the following decade only half a million succeeded in making the journey. Nonetheless, East German population did not grow. In 1989 it remained about 17 million, approximately where it had been in 1961 and less than it had been in 1949. Worse, the wall became “a permanent, massive, anti-Communist propaganda exhibition” to which tourists—from presidents to ordinary citizens—flocked from all over the world.”

CHAPTER 2 « The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 71

East Germany's diplomatic isolation ended in December 1972, when initiatives from West Germany led to the signing of the Basic Treaty committing the two Germanies to “normal, good-neighborly relations on the basis of equality. 4 Worldwide diplomatic recognition followed rapidly, as did admission to the United Nations and participation in the Helsinki Accords of 1975. The man who signed the Basic Treaty for East Germany was Erich Honecker, from 1971 the leader of both the Socialist Unity party and the state. The son of a militantly left-wing coal miner from the Saarland, Honecker joined the Communist party at age seventeen at the beginning of the Great Depression and as a young man attended the Comintern School in Moscow. He survived the war because he spent the ten years from 1935 to 1945 in a Nazi prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Despite the reserved manner that this experience reinforced in Honecker, his unswerving loyalty to postwar leader Walter Ulbricht and to the Soviet Union permitted him to rise rapidly through the party ranks to become, by 1958, the politburo member in charge of army affairs and internal security. Honecker took over from Walter Ulbricht in 1971 because he was more willing to follow the Soviet policy of détente than his predecessor, but in many ways Honecker was more rigid than the none-too-flexible Ulbricht. He quickly declared that the German Democratic Republic was a “class society of a special type, reported that Ulbricht’s economic reforms had created “serious industrial ‘distortions’ that might take ‘years to overcome,” and began to replace Ulbricht’s technically competent bureaucrats with administrators with purely party backgrounds. Honecker’s view, which he maintained until Gorbachev's time, was that absolute loyalty to the Soviet Union was the “decisive criterion of fidelity to Marxism-Leninism.”5° An unpretentious man in private, much more able to relax with friends and even servants than Ulbricht, Honecker’s public persona of a dedicated and rigid neo-Stalinist well suited the Brezhnev years.°! One of the most important benefits of the Basic Treaty Honecker signed with West Germany in 1972 was that it provided for direct monetary payments to East Germany. By the late 1970s these payments, when added to the liberal credits that West Germany had provided since the 1950s to facilitate inter-German trade, reached the substantial sum of 600 million marks a year. One analyst has calculated that by the end of the 1980s East Germany and its citizens were receiving as much as six billion marks in various West German subsidies and advantages a year, or more than 15 percent of its “produced national income.” Part of this benefit came from the willingness of the European Community to consider East German goods imported into the Federal Republic as having been produced there, thus freeing those East German products from the tariffs to which they would otherwise have been subject. But opening relations with West Germany in 1972 gave new urgency to an old problem: how to encourage East Germans to distinguish positively between themselves and the West Germans? The East Germans had vigorously advocated unification in the first years after the war, but unification in a socialist state,

72 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

arguing that the West Germans were exclusively to blame for the division of Germany. As time passed, however, and the hope of Stalinizing West Germany became increasingly absurd, West Germany turned the tables by defining unification not as a mutually agreed upon federation, as Stalin had suggested in 1952, but as the incorporation of the smaller, poorer, and weaker East Germany into West Germany, a solution obviously unacceptable to the German Democratic Republic. Erich Honecker recognized this problem and found a logical if unrealistic solution: he denied that a single German nation existed. Under modern conditions, he argued, there were two Germanies, a bourgeois one and a socialist one. “There is no German question at all,” one of his ideological spokesmen said in 1973. “Rather there are two sovereign, socially opposed, and independent

German states and nations.” The methods that the dogmatic Honecker favored for “fencing off” (abgrenzung) East Germany were to improve the “political-ideological education of party members and all workers in the spirit of socialism” and to integrate East Germany as fully as possible into the CMEA in partnership with “the other countries of the socialist community.”54 Abgrenzung also meant forbidding key groups of functionaries to have contact with “foreigners” (that is, West Germans) and maintaining “guest books” of foreign visitors. “Germany” was eliminated in favor of the “German Democratic Republic” and schoolchildren had to be taught to hum the national anthem because it contained the verse “Arisen out of the ruin and headed for the future, let us serve Germany, our united fatherland.’”5

Honecker was enough of a realist to understand that it was not sufficient simply to assert that capitalism was bad and socialism good. East German life actually had to get better. The paradoxical result of the policy of abgrenzung, therefore, was that East Germany entered into competition with the West to improve life under socialism, while at the same time trying to create the illusion that East Germany constituted a nation of its own. There was nothing intrinsically impossible about this effort. After all, Austrians speak German and consider themselves part of a Germanic cultural world, but they remain Austrians, not Germans. East German historians began to assimilate such great figures of the German past as Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther, and Frederick the Great into their own history; East German television received orders to produce shows more competitive with the West German television offerings that most East Germans were able to view; consumer goods and housing received renewed emphasis; the most vigorous writers were permitted to travel, publish, and even

live for extended periods in the West; and extraordinary accomplishments in international sports competitions gave East Germans some highly visible successes to be proud of. For a while Honecker’s stiff-necked new programs seemed to succeed. East

Germany entered the world stage, its sovereignty apparently secured by the Helsinki Accords, and its economy improved to the extent that in the 1970s it was deemed to be the tenth largest in the world. Some observers even began to notice a sense of a distinct East German identity.5° But as in the rest of Eastern

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 73

Europe, by the end of the 1970s the veneer of success began to wear thin. Due to massive financial aid from West Germany, East Germany did not face the same debt problems that Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria did, but the stricter central-

ized controls that had been reimposed under Honecker were wreaking their usual havoc—overinvestment, inefficient pricing, soft budget constraints, and the rest. This does not mean, however, that ordinary Germans did not live more or less ordinary lives.57 Just as West Germans were shocked when they discovered how shabby life really was in East Germany, so were East Germans shocked to read the avalanche of critical works about the totalitarian nature of the regime

they lived under. The East German regime was imposed and never had the legitimacy of an elected or chosen government. But its modernization ethic that claimed to rely on science, its efforts to bring employment to all, and its emphasis on a new role for women were goals shared by most East Germans. By the 1970s entire new generations were entering into adulthood that had found, as all human beings do, the ways and means of coping with the society they lived in, including ways to complain and make their views known without actually bringing down the police. Western analysts often focus on the negatives, on stories of resistance, on economic failure, but at the same time we must not forget that within those constraints most people found ways to experience childhood, school, marriage, ambition, and failure that are the lot of all human beings. One knew that there were limits, but one could live. Of course there was disaffection in East Germany, but it differed in several ways from that found in Romania and Bulgaria Europe. For one thing, because of East Germany’s proximity to the West, rock music made much greater inroads there than in southeastern Europe. All East European regimes recognized the subversive nature of this music, which tended “to be hard driving and given to half-resolved or even unresolved dissonances,”’ as one historian puts it. The regimes wanted triumphant or nonevocatory music, not music with lyrics displaying “consistent and unmitigated subjectivity” or private feelings and perceptions.58 In October 1977, a year after the conviction of the members of People of the Plastic Universe in Czechoslovakia, a riot at a rock concert in East Germany turned anti-Soviet, and the regime reacted with repression, but at the same time it also had to permit an increasing amount of sanitized rock music of its own, thus chipping away at its claim to cultural hegemony.*? If the lack of revisionist critics of Marxism was one of the reasons for the absence of an antipolitical opposition in Romania and Bulgaria, the same cannot be said for East Germany. In 1956, for example, Wolfgang Harich proposed to transfer “power from the party to an elected national assembly,” and was imprisoned for his temerity.°° In 1963 Robert Havemann, a lifelong communist activist who had known Honecker in prison during the war, lacerated the regime for being dogmatic rather than dialectical. He soon found himself under house arrest and his every move shadowed by a team of intrusive political police.*! And in 1977 Rudolf Bahro, a career party man, was pushed into exile for smuggling

74. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

his secretly written book Alternatives to the West. Bahro criticized the regime for trying to compete with capitalism in consumer goods. He did not want the GDR to succumb to Western consumerism, which as a leftist he despised.”

The most vigorous form of organized opposition was the unofficial peace movement that emerged in reaction to the increasing militarization of East German society in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Soviets and their allies held that since, by definition, their regimes favored peace, any expression of pacifist sentiment outside the official peace organizations were “objectively” antipacifist. Thus the regime disapproved when some Protestant groups spoke out against the

militarization of East German society through the introduction of widespread civil defense exercises, teaching army songs in nursery school, practicing hand grenade throwing in sports classes in the fourth grade, and providing ninthand tenth-grade paramilitary training. Although it presumably was within the capacity of the Stasi—Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service)—to crush the pacifists (some one hundred pacifists were arrested in 1983), the government permitted the churches to provide shelter for these and other movements.*4 The role of the Protestant churches remains controversial, since a number of pastors were later found to be informants. Some churches provided a home for peace activists and other programs not entirely approved by the regime, while at the same time they also “served to domesticate and channel such dissent.” Why did these weakly organized protest movements—environmental and feminist groups existed as well—not develop the same kind of antipolitical thinking as their colleagues in Czechoslovakia and Poland? A significant reason was that the regime dealt with its small number of critics both harshly and cleverly. In addition to arresting and imprisoning dissidents, authorities often simply threw them into the West German briar patch. “One has to say that the demonstrators are mainly people who want to leave the GDR,” one activist lamented late in the

1980s. “They have now learned that if one takes part in a demonstration, one quickly gets out of the country.’6 Continually demoralized by this tactic, the oppositionists could not count on significant support from East German writers either. Many authors, such as East Germany's most important novelist Christa Wolf, opposed Honecker’s regime but they tended to oppose it in Marxist terms often from the vantage point of comfortable and lengthy stays abroad. Critical of the cultural norms of Western capitalism, although willing to endure them periodically, these authors did not evolve in the direction of antipolitical pluralism and therefore did not generate the kind of moral strength or political challenge that proved valuable to Czech oppositionists. But probably the most important reason no movement for an independent society took hold in East Germany was the country’s proximity to the West, which had two complementary effects. First, when East German writers, almost all of whom began from leftist assumptions in the first place, peeked over the wall by means of their television sets, they did not like the consumer society they saw on the other side. For reformers in other parts of Eastern Europe, democracy,

constitutionalism, and civil liberties were more or less empty concepts, icons

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 75

standing for all that was good about the West but without experiential meaning. In East Germany the West was a concrete and sometimes not-altogether-appealing country literally within sight. East German oppositionists hated their regime and wanted to replace it, but not with a crass materialism. They were therefore inclined to stick to specific reform objectives that could have application in both East and West, such as the peace movement, rather than to speculations based on Western ethical precepts. The closeness to West Germany had just the opposite effect on ordinary citizens. East Germans had access to Western television, were visited by millions of relatives and friends from the other side every year, and suffered the humiliation of heavily armed borders constantly patrolled to keep the young and vigorous from emigrating. The ordinary East German, despite a certain defensiveness and pride in some of the country’s successes, envied the brightly lit, colorful, and vivacious Kurftirstendamm in West Berlin, which contrasted so starkly with the dimly lit gray facades lining the almost empty Unter den Linden in East Berlin. Alienated from a false regime that gave them no hope of a normal future, hundreds of thousands of East Germans could conceive of no better solution for their personal lives than escape to the West.°

“NORMALIZATION” IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA The fourth of the neo-Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, went

through a trauma that no other East European state experienced: invasion by their Warsaw Pact neighbors. At first, party leader Alexander Dubcek, who was none too agile a politician, had hoped he would be able to save some of the reforms outlined in the April program. In fact, during the first months after the Warsaw Pact invasion, borders remained relatively open while discussion of the new laws on decentralizing industry and on workers’ self-management proceeded. A new law making Czechoslovakia a federal state actually went into effect on January 1, 1969. But from the beginning it was obvious that the Soviets were not going to permit Dubéek room for maneuver. Only two weeks after the invasion, special Soviet envoy V. V. Kuznetsov told the Czechoslovaks that “the process of nor-

malization means, first of all, the complete exposure and stamping out of the subversive activities of the right-wing, anti-socialist forces.”6’ By October Dubcek had to sign a treaty authorizing the “temporary” stay of Soviet troops in his country, and by the end of the year no further references to the April program could be heard. In March 1969 Gustav Husak replaced Dubéek, who disappeared into obscure retirement.

Eight months earlier, Husak would have been a completely unexpected appointment. A loyal Communist who spent time in a Nazi prison during World War II, Husak had been sent to prison again during the Stalinist purges of the early 1950s as a bourgeois nationalist. He reentered politics only in April 1968, when he emerged from obscurity in Slovakia to become deputy prime minister. During the Prague Spring Husak established a reputation as a moderate reformer,

76 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

but in fact he was a pragmatic and austere politician with an authoritarian streak and a hunger for power, more like Wtadistaw Gomultka than Edward Gierek. He also had one quality that the Soviets admired greatly—the ability quickly to grasp the new power situation. On the occasion of a later trip to Moscow, when Brezhnev personally dressed down the Czechoslovak delegation, Husak allegedly remarked, “We came; we saw; we lost.’ From the beginning Husak understood that resistance to the Soviets was impossible and began to court their support. Husak was far from being the worst possible successor to Dubéek. On the extreme fringes Moscow nurtured a group of “ultras” who explained the reform period as an imperialist plot and spoke of vengeance. Slightly less extreme but still unstinting in his loyalty to the narrowest kind of Brezhnevism was Vasil B’ilak, who stated his view succinctly in May 1971: “Never again must we give [the reformers] the slightest opportunity to assert themselves.””° Finally, there was the head of the Czech party, Lubomir Strougal, who over time inclined moderately toward reform. Among these possibilities Husak was the most pragmatic, the one who recognized the necessity of following a Moscow- oriented line but at the same time realized that he had a disaffected and unsettled country to run. Husak was never able to dispense with his adversaries, but on the other hand they were never able to overthrow him. Eventually all sides came to accept a unique situation of duarchy, B’ilak the hardliner and Husak the moderate, because it preserved the stability of the top party organs, although Soviet support of B’ilak’s constant pressure to increase the harshness of the “normalization” process consistently carried the day. “Others,” writes Vlad Kusin, “imprinted their stamp on the history of the [1970s] through [Husak’s] good offices and over his signature.”7! Milan Simekéa called “normalization” a process of “civilized violence.””2

The massive purge that began in 1970 under B’ilak’s direct command led to interviews with a million and a half party members and forced resignations from almost five hundred thousand of them. Most important from the point of view

of public life, the Husak-B’ilak regime mounted an all-out attack on cultural institutions. The Prague broadcasting station lost fifteen hundred employees; forty-five of the eighty editors of the party paper were dismissed; every literary and cultural journal—some twenty-five of them—was closed; twelve hundred scholars connected with the Academy of Sciences lost their positions; and five university departments, including sociology, were abolished altogether. Other actions were equally destructive of social trust: all members of the state and federal legislatures were reselected; crude historical revisions, such as ripping out offending pages in textbooks, were undertaken in primary education; and a militant campaign of aggressive atheism began.73 But, as Simek€a points out, no one was killed. There was no third degree, no physical torture. Interrogations took place during normal working hours. One could continue to occupy one’s flat after dismissal. “When bugging devices were installed in people’s flats, it would be done without damage to the furniture.””4

Victims left their jobs with a handshake and simply found menial work as street sweepers, window washers, and boiler stokers. In part because of this

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 77

paradoxically civilized method of persecution, the dismissals and humiliating social descent of so many affected not only the losers but everyone around them. Caution, adaptation, removal became the order of the day. At first a few former Communists tried to salvage the idea of reform socialism, but late in 1971 and early in 1972 the police arrested some 200 of them and courts sentenced 47 of these to a total of 118 years in prison. Thus ended “socialism with a human face” as a viable idea among the Czech intelligentsia. It was in this severely demoralized atmosphere, which the regime created as the condition of its own existence, that the ethical message of the tiny antipolitical movement described in the last chapter began to take shape. “Normalization” was not simply repression, however. The second prong of the Husak-B’ilak policy resembled that of Poland’s Gierek or East Germany’s Honecker during the same period: buy off the population with material benefits without modifying the command structure of the economy or the party's dominant position. Because of the residual effects of the beneficial reforms made in the 1960s, growth continued into the first half of the 1970s and the Czechoslovak government did not overextend itself with Western credits. Debt built up, but by 1980 it remained the lowest per capita in Eastern Europe. In addition, the “normalizers” occasionally did the right thing. In 1969, for example, prices were adjusted successfully, thus bringing them more in line with actual costs than in some other East European countries. But the “normalizers,” still in thrall to the obsolete ideas of the 1950s, found it impossible to let the economy alone. In agriculture they did their best to kill the goose by merging agricultural units into larger and larger industrial-style enterprises, each under stricter political control, much like the East Germans and the Bulgarians. A campaign against the less than 10 percent of the farm population that was still private, most of it in remote western Slovakia, reduced the number of private farmers by more than half. Even the semisacred private plot came under pressure. Unsurprisingly, the respectable agricultural growth of the period from 1965 to 1975 began to taper off. In industry the Husak-B’ilak regime managed to avoid the worst mistakes of Gierek in Poland, but by 1980 the growth

rate was declining and the familiar problems of quality control, energy inefficiency, and trade deficits presented the regime with intractable, indeed insoluble, problems.

Whatever the difficulties, Husak-B’ilak managed to keep real wages rising, and ordinary Czechs and Slovaks were sufficiently satisfied with daily life that for almost twenty years the opposition generated by Charter 77 activists did not strike deep roots. This was not because the population accepted or liked the regime but because ordinary people were convinced that any overt display of “living in truth” would have unpleasant financial and emotional results. Ordinary Czechs considered the oppositionists simply foolish. Workers repairing the flat of Zdena Tominova, for example, rather than showing sympathy for her resistance to the regime, laughed at her stupidity. “Piss on their slogans when their backs are turned,” was their advice.75 The overwhelming majority of Czechoslovak citizens

78 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

simply went about their private lives and let it go at that. And so did the authorities. No longer did the state ask that one believe. Its own operatives themselves no longer did. “Fanaticism,” as Milan Simek¢a put it, “grew weary and died.” All one had to do was conform in public, and then a reasonably comfortable private life was possible. Until the very last moments of its existence in 1989, this was the social contract the Communist leaders of Czechoslovakia offered their citizens.

THE FIFTH WHEEL One more ruler fits nicely, all too nicely, into Charles Gati’s Gang of Four, a fifth wheel so to speak: Enver Hoxha of Albania. During the Cold War period Albania was so isolated, so completely cut off from any normal connections with the rest of the world that it is no wonder Gati did not include its ruler in his group. Albania emerged as a country only in 1912, just prior to the confusions of World War I.77 Never really unified, the country was divided into a tribal society

of mountain clans in the North (the Ghegs), more pastoral people in the south (the Tosks), and a handful of urban dwellers. During the interwar years Benito Mussolini dominated the poverty stricken land, which was nominally led by King Zog. As German occupiers retreated from the region at the close of the Second World War, a fierce struggle for power broke out among the adherents of King Zog (a Gheg), a nationalist organization Balli Kombetar (National Union, mostly Tosks), and a miniscule communist party led by Hoxha. By the end of the war, Hoxha’s Anti-Fascist Council controlled most of the country, largely through the help of Tito’s Partisans, who had imperial designs on Albania. By the end of 1945 Hoxha became the head of the new People’s Republic of Albania.

Unlike Zhivkov, Ceausescu, and Honecker, Hoxha came from a wellto-do family and spent much of the 1930s in France. Despite his later cruelty and paranoia, he was an intelligent man and remained a cultured individual throughout his life. Nevertheless, Hoxha was a strict Stalinist, so that when Stalin broke with Tito in 1948, Hoxha severed relations with Yugoslavia. Then

when Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev achieved a rapprochement with Yugoslavia, Hoxha broke with him and sided with Communist China. But by the 1970s relations with China cooled and Albania retreated into almost complete isolation. One of Hoxha’s most ardent desires, besides taking whatever brutal measures were needed to maintain his own power, was his campaign

to stamp out organized religion. About 50 percent of Albanians are Sunni Muslim, 20 percent Bekhtashi, 20 percent Catholic, and 10 percent Orthodox. In 1967 Hoxha closed all places of worship, arrested all clerics, and declared Albania to be the world’s first fully atheist state.” He also had a peculiar idea of what constituted military security. Since Albania was too poor to afford a truly modern army, he insisted on constructing tens of thousands of small cement pillboxes throughout the country from which, presumably, Albania marksmen could repulse any invaders. Not, of course, that anyone had any desire to challenge the poorest country in Europe.

CHAPTER 2 « The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 79

Unlike his colleagues in the Gang of Four, Hoxha did not survive to see the collapse of his regime. Dying in 1985 at the age of 76, he was succeeded by the more practical and somewhat less ideological Ramiz Alia to whom fell the honor of escorting this moribund regime out the door in 1991.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV: THE IMPROBABLE REFORMER In 1985 an aging cohort of rigid neo-Stalinists still ruled the five most conservative East European countries. Ceausescu, Honecker, Husak, Zhivkov, and Hoxha had succeeded in keeping themselves in power but not in addressing any of the

serious problems their countries faced. The incipient information revolution posed insurmountable new problems for their already none-too-viable economies, their citizenry had long since concluded their regimes were false, and even the ruling elites themselves had lost their confidence.” The socialism that in the 1950s could be presented as a plausible developmental and social ideology now appeared to the overwhelming majority of the people of Eastern Europe to be a hollow and outworn shell in which the ruling bureaucracy encased itself simply to maintain its own privileges. Leonid Brezhnev had passed on in 1982, but his generational and ideological brethren, the administrators of civilized violence, had not. In March 1985, however, a new leader appeared in the Soviet Union who did change direction, a substantial and unexpected change that had fateful consequences. After the incompetent and doddering Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev was a surprising, almost unbelievable new leader. His “intellectual capacity and flexibility, his ability to learn on the job, his powers of argumentation, charismatic appeal, serenity in the midst of social turmoil, faith that turbulence will ‘smooth out’ in the long run, his sustained, single-minded motivation

and irrepressible optimism, his energy, determination, and tactical political skill” marked Gorbachev as one of the world’s most remarkable leaders in the second half of the twentieth century.8° Even before coming to power Gorbachev had spoken of the need for “deep transformations” in the Soviet economy and of the need for “wide, prompt, and frank information” in a socialist democracy. Almost as soon as he took over Soviet leadership he began speaking about the need for substantial economic reform and about the necessity for honesty in public affairs, not only in the sense of combating alcoholism or the corruption of the Brezhnev years but in the sense of bringing society into the public debate.8! He initiated a daring foreign policy based on what he called “new thinking,” proposing an entirely new European alignment in which the Soviet Union would be a partner, not an antagonist. At the close of a meeting with French president Francois Mitterrand only seven months after taking power, Gorbachev put his goal succinctly: “The Soviet Union seriously intends to change the situation in the world.”82

After eighteen years of the gray rule of Leonid Brezhnev and more than two years of rule by dying men, the Western world was perplexed, if not astonished.

80 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Where had this man come from? Could they believe him? Was it possible for a hyperrationalist system to restructure itself, especially one in which many ancient traditions of Russian autocracy seemed reproduced in modern guise? The initial reaction was skepticism and doubt. The United States ambassador to the Soviet Union thought that Gorbachev’s words seemed new but that the substance would amount to nothing. Right-wing observers scoffed at the lack of specifics in his talk of economic reform, and more balanced analysts wondered if a system so completely demarketized could change in a way that would be acceptable to the huge bureaucracy of the ruling party. Even Gorbachev himself, when asked in February 1986 if the Soviet Union was beginning a “new revolution,”

replied, “Of course not. I think it would be wrong to formulate the question in those terms.”83

The question itself suggests the wonderment of observers at this unexpected blazing star. But Gorbachev's emergence from the grayness of the Soviet bureaucracy was not, as Soviet analysts used to say, an accident. He represented a vigor-

ous element in the Communist party that for some years had been anxious to rectify the serious economic and strategic problems they knew the Soviet Union faced at the end of the 1970s. These realists did not reject socialism, and none of them intended to destroy the Soviet Union. They began from the premise that the Soviet Union had made important progress since Stalin. When the great dictator died the Soviet economy was in a shambles, the standard of living below that even of tsarist times. The thaw introduced by Khrushchev and the efforts to improve economic performance in the late 1950s and the 1960s raised both morale and living standards in a way that Soviet citizens could readily observe. Under Brezhnev it was the peasants’ turn to enter the mainstream of Soviet life, as their incomes increased and they obtained coverage under the national health plan. Increased military spending gave the Soviets an impressive space program and vastly increased their strategic power, especially under Brezhnev, who concentrated on building up the Soviet missile force and in creating a blue water navy.

The realists could be proud of other Soviet successes as well, such as the integration into city life of a phenomenal influx of new residents from the countryside and the education of its population. Before World War II some 56 million Soviet citizens lived in cities, and the overwhelming majority of workers and peasants had at best only four years of schooling. By the mid-1980s the number of Soviets living in cities had risen to 180 million, and more than 80 percent of manual laborers had finished more than four years of education.*4 This vast social revolution had fundamental implications for the possibilities of economic and political change in the Soviet Union. Workers born around 1910 had entered the work force as manual laborers, often in agriculture, and remained primarily engaged in physical labor most of their lives.85 Workers born

around 1930 encountered a somewhat more complex economy and often were employed in industry, where more than manual skills were needed. But two thirds of the workers born around 1950 joined what Soviet sociologists called the

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 81

“intellectual labor force” and never encountered physical work. In other words, as the Soviet economy modernized, the kinds of problems ordinary citizens faced changed dramatically and the skills they possessed to cope with change became more developed. A similar kind of generational differentiation existed among the leadership. In the late 1970s Jerry Hough enumerated four post-Khrushchevian leadership generations in the Soviet Union.’6 The first was Brezhnev’s generation, born before 1910, the members of which moved up during the Stalinist purges. The second comprised those born between 1910 and 1918, including future general secretaries Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, who were thrust upward during World War II. The third generation, born between 1919 and 1926, was missing due to the horrible slaughter of the war, thus leaving a significant educational and experiential gap between men like Chernenko and the members of the fourth generation, who were born after 1926, a group that included Mikhail Gorbachev. As early as 1959 Edward Crankshaw recognized that the men of this generation were different.’” Party functionaries in the first two generations “survived either because they were too stupid to be considered dangerous, or because they brought sycophancy to a fine art, or because they were as cunning as the fox.” The post-1926 generation, however, was “relaxed and easy in manner, often with a pleasantly ironical approach to life, and very much in touch with realities of every kind.”88

The advance scouts of this generation, and Gorbachev was among the first of them, began to enter the top leadership in the late 1970s. By coincidence, just at this time Soviet economic growth rates began to decline for the first time since Stalin’s death. The very success of absorbing the huge influx of men and women into the cities made further gains by the addition of labor problematic. Faltering in its developmental plans and needing to improve its efficiency, the Soviet Union was confronted with dynamic technological challenges that its lumbering economic system was ill-prepared to meet. The Soviet economy suffered all the usual disabilities of a command economy. Gorbachev himself outlined some of these in his book Perestroika, published in 1987. In the 1970s, he said, “the country began to lose momentum” because of declining efficiency, excessive use of energy and raw materials, waste of capital, poor consumer products, a wage-leveling mentality, lack of long-range planning, inability to attack important social needs such as housing, unproductive agriculture, and a decline of ideological and moral values that grew from reliance on the propaganda of success rather than on honest accomplishments and gains. Sounding more like a Western sovietologist than the general secretary of the Communist party, Gorbachev concluded that the “country was verging on crisis.”89

These problems had not been unknown to the men around Leonid Brezhney, nor were they unobserved elsewhere in the Soviet bloc.9° But unlike the younger

generation of realists, Brezhnev was unwilling, and perhaps unable, to think his way to a possible solution. The five-year plan for 1981-1985 recognized that

82 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

growth was declining, but its authors could come up with nothing better than to promote heavy industry and to insist for the umpteenth time on better planning. Writing in 1981, the American economist Abram Bergson realized that this strategy was not only likely to fail, as it had in the past, but also to make the need for more dramatic reforms apparent. “Failure to fulfill even [this] comparatively modest plan, Bergson wrote, “could make more impelling the case for finally taking an action that the leadership has evidently resisted so far: to initiate a radical reform of the planning mechanism.”®! Gorbachev's selection in 1985 as general secretary instead of a Brezhnevian candidate constituted an explicit decision for reform.°? After a fairly slow start,

Gorbachev installed changes of such magnitude that they produced the collapse of the Soviet Union he was trying to save. Perestroika, the Russian term for “restructuring, was the first plank of Gorbachev's program. It was intended to revitalize the Soviet economy, but was not conceived as a marketizing reform. Its first principle was supposedly that the Soviet economy would remain centrally planned.3 Nevertheless, three basic pieces of legislation fatally undermined that principle. The Law of Individual Economic Activity (1986) freed small scale businesses like repair shops from state control; The Law on State Enterprise (1987) devolved considerable authority to enterprise managers, enabling them to begin converting their businesses into private ownership; and the Law on Cooperatives (1988) permitted the creation of what were essentially private firms.®4 The Soviet economy almost certainly could have continued at its low level of efficiency for some time. As the noted Hungarian economist Janos Kornai wrote, “A system that is neither efficient nor optimal may also be viable.”5 But a command economy needs commanders, and when these new laws left the party unable to play that role, the economy spun out of control. In other words, the collapse of the Soviet economy was primarily due to the political choices made by Gorbachev's reformers, and was not fundamentally a product of economic weakness. % The second major innovation, closely related to Gorbachev's personal “confidence in the people and respect for their intelligence and feelings, and for their ability to understand events for themselves,” was to change the political language through a policy of openness, or glasnost.°7 Gorbachev believed as a matter of principle that the people should have more say in how society should run, both because they were capable of adding to Soviet society and because it was the right thing to do. “This is why we started everything in the first place,” he said later, “so a human being can feel normal, can feel good, in a socialist state. So that he will feel above all like a human being.” A more instrumental view, but probably a less important one for Gorbachev, might be that he hoped to draw the intelligentsia to his side by permitting them the kinds of freedoms they could only have dreamed of under previous regimes. Since glasnost was contrary to decades of Soviet experience, it got off to a slow start. But the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in April 1986 shocked and mobilized the Soviet leadership, which realized that their efforts to conceal the enormity of the accident greatly increased the victims’ suffering and correspondingly

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 83

decreased the party's credibility. The main signal that openness actually would be tolerated was the release late in 1986 of the great moral critic Andrei Sakharov from exile. By late 1986 and early 1987 previously unheard of things started happening: new editors at a resuscitated Novy Mir (New World) and at Moscow News began expanding the limits of censorship; daring economists suggested that real markets were needed; films critical of dictators and specifically of Stalin were taken off the shelf and shown to enthusiastic audiences; television news programs turned to factual reporting; even tourist maps were redrawn correctly instead of with purposeful errors. To a Soviet population used to massive disinformation these simple steps were stunning. For seventy years the Soviet regime had encouraged apathy and conformity as two of its best supports; now Gorbachev sought to shake off the dullness, to create the excitement and enthusiasm that would draw in the creative powers of the intelligentsia and marshal the working enthusiasms of the people. It appears that Gorbachev believed that the old nomenklatura, or Soviet bureaucracy, was sabotaging perestroika. In fact, his reforms received little or no opposition from the nomenklatura. This may have been in part because neither the leadership nor its economic advisors had the slightest knowledge of macroeconomics or its workings, and therefore had little theoretical or practical background on which to base criticism. Nevertheless, by 1988 Gorbachev concluded that only a reform of the political system could bypass this bureaucracy and create popular enthusiasm. In a remarkable series of maneuvers he cajoled and browbeat the party and then the government into creating a new Congress of People’s Deputies elected on the basis of secret ballot in openly contested elections.9? By including “the broad masses of the working people in the management of all state and public affairs,” Gorbachev believed he would “complete the creation of a socialist state based on the rule of law,” reform the party, and legitimize perestroika all at the same time.!° After wooing the intellectuals with glasnost, the elections would woo the people with demokratsiya. During 1988 and 1989 Gorbachev translated this scheme into something resembling actuality. On May 25, 1989, a competitively elected Congress of People’s Deputies convened and in full view of an engrossed nationwide television audience proceeded to engage in bona fide political contestation. What did these dramatic, not to say astonishing, events mean for Eastern Europe? What Gorbachev the reformer of socialism saw, when he looked at Eastern Europe, was a set of countries run by men of Chernenko’s generation using Brezhnev's ideas. He also saw countries that were becoming an economic burden and, with the proliferation of long range missiles, a depreciating strategic asset.10! How could Gorbachev rejuvenate socialism in these peripheral socialist partners when they were suffering from the same economic problems and lack of legitimacy that Brezhnev had brought to the Soviet Union? From early on the new Soviet leadership began hinting to East European leaders that Gorbachev would not interfere in their business. Initially there was little reason to take him seriously. Ever since Khrushchev had apologized to Yugoslavia in 1955, Soviet and

84. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

East European leaders alike, albeit in different contexts and with different meanings, had claimed that each socialist state was free to pursue socialism in its own way. In 1969, less than a year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, an international meeting of Communist and workers’ parties in Moscow declared that “all parties have equal rights.... There is no leading center of the international Communist movement.”102 Thus Gorbachev did not seem to be taking a dramatic initiative in 1987 when he wrote that “the entire framework of political relations between socialist countries must be strictly based on absolute independence,” especially when he pointed out, much as the 1969 program had, that despite this independence, the East European countries and the Soviet Union needed to achieve a “harmonization of initiatives” that would lead to “mutual advantage and mutual assistance” under the umbrella of CMEA, which should “coordinate economic policies” and develop “normative standards for the integration mechanism.”! After all, Gorbachev wrote, the “socialist Community has everything it needs” for doubling and even tripling productivity by the year 2000.104 Even Gorbachev's most famous and most meaningful phrase, “the creation of acommon European home,” which he first used in a visit to England in 1984 before becoming general secretary, could be interpreted as simply an extended gloss on Leonid Brezhnev’s similar statement in Bonn in November 1981. Speaking against NATO’s decision to place cruise missiles in Western Europe, the Soviet leader had said, “Whatever may divide us, Europe is our common home. Common fate has linked us through centuries, it links us today too.”!%

Therefore, most observers both East and West saw nothing very new in Gorbachev's initiatives.!°° Commenting late in 1987, two Western analysts argued that Gorbachev's policy had “the clear goal of exploiting the Eastern Europeans to serve his [Gorbachev's] domestic economic goals. His success in this venture

would also entail more effectively integrating the bloc, [thus] enhancing longterm Soviet domination of its allies.”!°7 In Poland, Dawid Warszawski (the pseud-

onym of Konstanty Gebert) wrote the following: “Gorbachev's failure would result only in the continuation of the status quo. If he succeeds, however, we can expect that domestic liberalization in the USSR will be accompanied by a turning of the screw in the peripheral areas as a sop to the CPSU conservatives.”108 In November 1987, Deputy Director of the CIA Robert M. Gates wrote that “it is hard to detect fundamental changes, currently or in prospect, in the way the Soviets govern at home or in their principal objectives abroad.” But Gorbachev actually was serious. He sought a fundamental change in the traditional Soviet policy of hostility toward the West. Ever since 1917 the Bolsheviks had presented a hostile face to a world they believed threatened them.

Stalin’s successors pursued this two-camp policy in modified form even after his death. The result of these seventy years of hostility had been to surround the Soviet Union with enemies and to distort its economy with military expenditures. Such hostility in the thermonuclear age seemed to the new leaders potentially disastrous in case of war and debilitating in case of peace. Only four months after coming to power, Gorbachev indicated that his foreign policy would not follow

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 85

in the old pathways when he replaced Andrei Gromyko, the most senior foreign minister in the world, with Eduard Shevardnadze, a brilliant and free-thinking Georgian politician with little experience in foreign policy but with no skeletons in foreign service closets. The two newcomers to power, in collaboration with Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s most important reformist advisor, immediately “began looking for ways in which we might live,” as Gorbachev put it later. As he worked his way into his leadership role, Gorbachev became increasingly convinced that Soviet self-interest could best be served by abandoning the two-camp idea. Dialogue and competition were what was needed, not imposition from one side or the other. “The interdependency of survival is of cardinal importance” is how the Soviet ambassador to the United States phrased it.!!° “The conflict between two opposing systems is no longer the decisive tendency in the present age,” Shevardnadze said in 1988.11! Europe was not to be the exclusive domain of the Western nations, but the common home of Soviet and East European peoples as well. By 1988 Gorbachev had gone beyond Brezhnev’s ritual statements and made the theme of acommon European home the basis of his foreign policy. Openness to the West was not only right, he thought—and he stressed the ethical dimension in his statements and speeches—but it also had the possibility of important strategic advantages. Lessening arms expenditures would release resources for productive investment. Friendship with Europe would open up possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and especially for needed economic credits. And, best of all, lowering the temperature of international politics would lessen, perhaps even eliminate, the justification for keeping so many American troops in Europe. Perhaps the “New Thinking” could achieve with honey what Soviet policy had clearly failed to do with vinegar—eliminate the American presence on the continent. Few people in Eastern Europe realized the full implications for themselves of Gorbachev's new grand strategy, which did not become clear to the most perspicacious of them until late 1988 or even 1989.112 But Gorbachev did not fully recognize the implications of his new ideas for Eastern Europe either. He did not intend to bury socialism, but to revivify it. “If we can bring people back into the socialist system instead of alienating them,” he said as late as July 1989, “we can give socialism a second wind.”!!3 In all likelihood he hoped that men like himself would come to power in Eastern Europe, mini-Gorbachevs who would shake up their tired regimes and restore popular support for socialism, just as he was convinced he was doing in the Soviet Union. One reason for Gorbachev's miscalculations in Eastern Europe may have been that he was not receiving completely accurate assessments of the public mood from his representatives there. Ambassadorships and similar high-ranking diplomatic jobs in Eastern Europe were the preserve of the party rather than of the professionals of the foreign office.!4 Soviet representatives in Eastern Europe who were “former party officials appealed to higher party levels in all questions, bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”!5 These representatives depended heavily on local party sources for their information rather than conducting their

86 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

own research. As late as spring 1989, for example, no one in the Soviet embassy in Prague was in contact with even the moderate Czech opposition, and Soviet observers came out onto the streets to observe events for themselves only several days after the decisive events of November 17.116

The enormous popularity that Gorbachev’s candor and charm before the cameras created, especially outside the borders of his own country, also may have helped convince him that reform communism was still possible in Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s Gorbachev was the most charismatic Soviet leader since Lenin. Enthusiastic crowds from London and New York in the West to Budapest and Prague in the East turned out to shout “Gorby! Gorby!” Gorbachev almost

certainly misinterpreted these reactions to his star quality as support for perestroika, when in fact it represented hostility toward a hollow system. Instead of indicating a possibility of revivifying socialism, the demonstrations actually indicated weariness with “real existing socialism.” But none of this was clear in 1987. No matter what sort of intriguing pos-

sibilities lurked in Gorbachev's rhetoric or in his popularity, and no matter how seriously policy makers such as West Germany's foreign minister HansDietrich Genscher or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took glasnost and perestroika, almost all analysts in the West were certain of one thing: under no circumstances would the Soviet Union give up its hegemony over Eastern Europe. Control of East Central Europe is a source of immense pride and security to the Soviets, the most tangible evidence of their great victory in the war; and that victory remains the most powerful legitimating experience of the soviet Communist system.... Hegemony over East Central Europe compensates the Russian people for their enormous sacrifices in the war and their endur-

ing grievances since its end. It validates the Soviet system to itself. Any Soviet yielding of the area not only would undermine the ideological claims of Communism...and degrade the Soviet Union’s credentials as a confident global power, but also would gravely jeopardize a basic internal Soviet consensus and erode the domestic security of the system itself.11”

Joseph Rothschild, the author of these lines written in 1987, lacked neither foresight nor analytical ability. Indeed, the loss of Eastern Europe did undermine the ideological claims of communism, degrade the Soviet Union’s power, and gravely jeopardize Soviet consensus. But in 1987 the unthinkability of these outcomes led sensible and clear-headed observers of Soviet behavior to the conclusion that the Soviets would never abandon Eastern Europe. This line of stereotyped thinking made Gorbachev's initiatives difficult to interpret and confirms the enormous originality of what he eventually permitted to happen. Norman Stone, writing in the Sunday Times in November 1987, pointed out that the logical consequence of perestroika, the relaxation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the abandonment of Moscow's “monopoly on truth” was “to dismantle the Berlin Wall and remove troops from Eastern Europe.”!!8 Stone did not seem to think that was going to happen. Gorbachev did not either.

CHAPTER 2 « The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 87

NOTES 1. Parts of Poland had been under Russian administration from 1772 until 1921, while Transylvania, which is now part of primarily Orthodox Romania, had strong trade ties with central Europe since medieval times. 2. Yugoslavia, which is also part of southeastern Europe, is an especially complex case and will be discussed separately in chapter 6. 3. Daniel Chirot points out that in the interwar period even the notorious rural overpopulation of Romania was on the way toward solution, since in the 1930s industrial employment grew at an annual rate of 3 percent per year, whereas annual population growth averaged only | percent. See Daniel Chirot, “Social Change in Communist Romania, Social Forces 57 (1978): 458-459. 4. Aman imprisoned with Ceausescu during the war says that “although he claimed to be a shoemaker, [Ceausescu] seemed incapable of learning a trade” (Pavel Campeanu, “The Revolt of the Romanians,” New York Review of Books, February I, 1990, 30). 5. R. J. Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 361. Between 1969 and 1972 Bulgaria consolidated 800 existing state and collective farms into 170 agroindustrial complexes. Robert J. McIntyre argues that they helped improve Bulgarian living standards, whereas Michael C. Wyzan says, “Far from being a model for other socialist countries, they have come to be emblematic of Zhivkov’s penchant for frequent and ill-considered organizational change.” See Robert J. McIntyre, “The Small Enterprise and Agricultural Initiatives in Bulgaria,” Soviet Studies 40 (1988): 602-615; and Michael C. Wyzan, “The Small Enterprise and Agricultural Initiatives in Bulgaria: A Comment on Robert J. McIntyre,” Soviet Studies 41 (1989): 646-653. 6. For the history of rock in Bulgaria, as well as other subjects related to youth culture, such as leisure, sexuality, and personal space, see Karin Taylor, Let’s Twist Again: Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2006). 7. Immediately after the Zhivkov regime fell in 1989, most Bulgarians were shocked

to read and see evidence of the brutality of these camps. For some horrific personal accounts, see Tzvetan Todorov, ed., Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria, trans. Robert Zaretsky (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 8. RFE, Bulgarian SR/1, January 18, 1988. 9. Michael Shafir presents such an explanation for the lack of opposition in Romania: Romania-Politics, Economics and Society: Political Stagnation and Simulated Change (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1985), 150-158. Some in Bulgaria also believe that the “absence of a legitimate and strong moral agency like the Polish

church” accounts for the inability of oppositionists to find each other (Jeffrey Goldfarb, After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe |New York: Basic Books, 1992], 164).

10. This view is not only popular in the Balkans itself, but received wide currency in the West through the widely read but flawed book by Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). 11. Zlatko Anguelov, Communism and the Remorse of an Innocent Victimizer (College Station, Texas: A&M University Press, 2002), 104. Anguelov says this about his experience in an elite school in the 1960s: “I do not remember a single act of rebellion, of dissident behavior, or basic teenage wrath” (74). On the other hand, Gerald W. Creed argues that everyday practice in the Bulgarian countryside, without overt resistance,

88 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN “transformed an oppressive, intrusive system into a tolerable one” (Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village [University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998], 3). 12. For a good discussion of these points see Maria N. Todorova, “Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria,” in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 148-167. 13. Fora thumbnail sketch of Zhivkov’s life see Stefan Krause, “Todor Zhivkov; Bulgaria's Long-time Communist Leader,” in Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of South Eastern Europe, ed. Bernd J. Fischer (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007), 354-391. 14. See the various characterizations gathered in Current Biography, 1976, 460-461; and Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 221. 15. Todorova, “Improbable Maverick,” 162.

16. For an English version of this document, see William E. Griffith, Sino-Soviet Relations, 1964-1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 269-296. 17. Chirot, “Social Change in Communist Romania,” 482. 18. Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceausescu: A Study in Political Leadership (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990), 85-94. 19. Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 236-248 is particularly good on this change. 20. A. Ciurchescu, as quoted by Dennis Deletant, “The Past in Contemporary Romania: Some Reflections on Current Romanian Historiography,” Slovo | (1988): 91. 21. Katherine Verdery contrasts the symbolic-ideological strategy with the use of remunerative mechanisms to maintain social control. After 1971 Ceausescu used fewer and fewer of the latter and more and more of the former. See her National Ideology Under Socialism: Romanian Identity, Intellectuals, and the Politics of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 22. For an engaging and amazing description of Elena’s nagging and petty character see Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite (New York: Villard Books, 1991), 169-191.

23. Information from Norman Manea, Romanian author, at the Illinois Summer Workshop in Russian and East European Studies, summer 1990. See too Maria Bucur, “Nicolae Ceausescu, the ‘Great Genius of the Carpathians,” in Balkan Strongmen, ed. Fischer, 325. 24. Mary Ellen Fischer, “Women in Romanian Politics: Elena Ceausescu, Pronatalism, and the Promotion of Women,” in Woman, State and Party in Eastern Europe, ed.

Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985), 123.

25. Mark Almond, “Worlds on the Brink of Change,” Times Literary Supplement, January 19-25, 1990, 56. For some comments on Elena’s personality, see Silviu Brucan, The Wasted Generation: Memoirs of the Romanian Journey from Capitalism to Socialism and Back (Boulder: East European Monographs 1993), 106-109. 26. Some authors suggest that in the quasi-developed state of Romania a cult of personality served a logical legitimating function, at least at first. See Mary Ellen Fischer, “Idol or Leader? The Origins and Future of the Ceausescu Cult,” in Romania in the 1980s, ed. Daniel N. Nelson (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986), 130-133; and Vlad Georgescu, “Politics, History and Nationalism: The Origins of Romania’s Socialist

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 89 Personality Cult,” in The Cult of Power: Dictators in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joseph Held (Boulder: East European Quarterly Press, 1983), 137. 27. Walter M. Bacon, Jr., “The Liturgics of Ceausescuism,” manuscript from the author, 9-10. Brackets in original. 28. Examples culled from the celebrations surrounding Ceausescu’s sixty-fifth birthday (Anneli Maeir, “Ceausescu's Birthday Extravaganza,” RFE, Romanian SR/3, February 19, 1983).

29. Quoted by Paul E. Michelson, “Romania” in Nationalism in the Balkans: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. Gale Stokes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 36. 30. Mary Ellen Fischer, Ceausescu, 96. 31. Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism, 132.

32. Discussion at the Illinois Summer Workshop in Soviet and East European Studies, 1990.

33. Shafir, Romania, 168-172. 34. Forathoroughand scholarly history of the Romanian Communist Party, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 35. Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics, 125. 36. Shafir, Romania, 146. 37. Dennis Deletant, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989 (London: Hurst & Company, 1995).

38. In the Stalinist period, and even into the sixties, however, tens of thousands of Romanians were imprisoned, just as were innocent victims throughout Eastern Europe in that period. For a harrowing account, see Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 39. Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), 20.

40. For East Germany, see Irwin L. Collier, Ir, “GDR Economic Policy during the Honecker Era,” Eastern European Economics 29 (1990): 12-14.

41. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). The puritanical Ceausescus sought to control Romanian bodies in another way as well. In 1968, they essentially outlawed homosexuality and lesbianism (Thomas J Keil, Romania’s Tortured Road Toward Modernity [Boulder: East European Monographs, 2006], 283-286). 42. See Robert J. McIntyre, “Pronatalist Programmes in Eastern Europe,” Soviet Studies 27 (July 1975): 366-380. 43. Henry P. David and Robert J. McIntyre, Reproductive Behavior: Central and Eastern European Experience (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1981), 179. 44. The average number of “legal abortions and women admitted to hospitals for aftercare or the treatment of complications of spontaneous or illegally induced” abortions for the five years 1975 to 1979 was 922 per thousand live births. In Czechoslovakia the number of legal abortions averaged 314 per thousand live births, in Hungary 501 (although when abortions were unrestricted in 1969-1973 the number was 1,221), in Bulgaria 826, and in Poland 218. See the tables for each country in David and McIntyre, Reproductive Behavior, 180, 226, 252, 285, and 128. 45. Dimitru Tepeneag, quoted by Shafir, Romania, 150. 46. Charles Gati, The Bloc that Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 162. The “Gang of Four” were four

90 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Chinese political figures close to Mao Tse Tung who implemented the radical reforms of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and were sentenced to long prison terms after Mao's death.

47. William Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 48. David Childs, The GDR: Moscow’s German Ally, 2nd ed. (London: Unwin Hyrnan, 1988), 64-65. 49. Childs, The GDR, 86. 50. Martin McCauley, The German Democratic Republic since 1945 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 153; and Current Biography 1972, 228-229. 51. Honecker’s biographer reports that Honecker insisted his housekeeper sit at the dinner table with him (Heinz Lippman, Honecker and the New Politics of Europe, trans. Helen Sebba [New York: Macmillan, 1972], 236). 52. Jerzy Lisiecki, “Financial and Material Transfers between East and West Germany,” Soviet Studies 42 (1990): 513-534.

53. Quoted by A. James McAdams, East Germany and Détente: Building Authority after the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 143. 54. The first quotation is from Honecker (McAdams, East Germany and Détente, 109) and the second from the party program of 1976 (McCauley, German Democratic Republic, 167). 55. Ronald D. Asmus, “The GDR and the German Nation: Sole Heir or Socialist Sibling?” International Affairs 60, no. 3 (1984): 409. 56. See, for example, John Starrels, “Nationalism in the German Democratic Republic,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 2 (1974): 23-37. 57. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) is an excellent study of daily life in the GDR. 58. Pedro [Sabrina] Ramet, “Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany,’ World Politics 37 (1984): 91.

59. Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold War East Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), especially chapters 9 and 10. 60 Peter C Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 131. 61. Security people occupied the house next door to Havemann and one across the street; everyone entering the street was interrogated; and sometimes as many as five cars followed him on his regulated and restricted trips to visit relatives. This was a common technique elsewhere as well. See Vaclav Havel, “Reports on My House Arrest,” in Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 215-229; and Brucan, The Wasted Generation, 138.

62. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternatives in Eastern Europe (London: New Left Books, 1978).

63. See Ramet, “Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany,’ 85-111. 64. This may have been because the Stasi so thoroughly infiltrated the various movements. For example, in 1992 Manfred Stolpe, one of eastern Germany’s most popular politicians and a lawyer who defended opposition groups in the 1980s admitted to having held clandestine meetings with the Stasi for many years, although he claimed these concerned primarily church matters. For a nuanced discussion of the difficult issues surrounding the Stolpe case, see Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949-1989 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), 119-123.

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 91 65. Robert F. Goeckel, The Lutheran Church and the East German State: Political Conflict and Change under Ulbricht and Honecker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 276.

66. Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Nascent Civil Society in the German Democratic Republic,” Problems of Communism 38 (March-June 1989): 109. 67. See Norman M. Naimark, “Is It True What They're Saying about East Germany?” Orbis 23 (1979): 549-577, who argues that none of the positive statistical measures of success during the 1970s in the GDR tapped the fear and resentment of the East German population, which had created widespread apathy and hopelessness. Despite criticism that he had seriously overstated his case, Naimark proved to be correct. 68. Quoted by Hans Renner, A History of Czechoslovakia since 1945 (London: Routledge, 1989), 87.

69. Vlad Kusin, From Dubcek to Charter 77: A Study of ‘Normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia, 1968-1978 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1978), 60. The reference is to Julius Caesar’s famous comment, “Veni, vidi,vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). 70. Kusin, From Dubéek to Charter 77, 136.

71. Kusin, From Dubéek to Charter 77, 326. Zdenék Mlynajé, on the other hand, considers that Husak “is not, nor ever will be, anything more than a Soviet viceroy in Czechoslovakia” (Zdenék Mlynaf, Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism [New York: Karz Publishers, 1980], 227).

72. Milan Simecka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia, 1969-1984 (London: Verso, 1984). 73. Renner, History of Czechoslovakia, 98-101; and Kusin, From Dubéek to Charter 77, 74-98. 74. Simecka, Restoration of Order, 78. 75. Mark Frankland, The Patriots’ Revolution: How Eastern Europe Toppled Communism and Won Its Freedom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 57. 76. Simecka, Restoration of Order, 84. 77. The best comprehensive history of Albania is Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History, rev. ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999). 78 Berndt J. Fischer, “Enver Hoxha and the Stalinist Dictatorship in Albania,” in Fischer, Balkan Strongmen, ed. Fischer, 264. 79. Gary L. Geipel, A. Tomasz Jarmoszko, and Seymour E. Goodman, “The Information Technologies and East European Societies,” East European Politics and Societies 5 (1991): 394-438. 80. George W. Breslauer, “Evaluating Gorbachev as Leader,” in Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: Politics and People, ed. A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1991), 402. 81. Robert Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 78. Kaiser stresses the importance of a programmatic speech of December 1984, when Gorbachev first broached the basics of his program.

82. Pravda, October 5, 1985, as published in the Current Digest of the Soviet Press 37 (November 6, 1985). 83. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, 132. 84. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 31, 47. 85. The generational differences outlined here are the work of Soviet anthropologists L. A. Gordon and V. V. Komarovskii, as discussed in Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon,

92 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 53-55. See also the work of Natalya Kozlova as cited by Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 311. 86. Jerry F. Hough, “The Generation Gap and the Brezhnev Succession,” Problems of Communism 28 (July-August 1979): 1-16. Hough published pictures of only four Soviet politicians in this article on the Brezhnev succession: one showing Andropov, Chernenko, and Grishin as representatives of what he called the second generation, and one showing Gorbachev as a representative of the fourth generation. All became general secretary, except Grishin, whom Gorbachev defeated when he became general secretary. Less prescient, although acute in his analysis of generational change, was Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), who barely mentioned Gorbachev. 87. “Men” is the proper term here. Women had little or no impact at the higher levels of Soviet government. 88. Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev’s Russia (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 90-91, 130, as quoted by Jerry Hough, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 20, 31. 89. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 18-24. 90. In 1981 Rezs6é Nyers, a prominent Hungarian economic reformer and architect of the New Economic Mechanism, noted that the Soviet economy was slowing down and searching “for different types of external cooperation,” which meant they were looking at the Hungarian reforms for potential guidance (quoted by Andrew Felkay, Hungary and the USSR, 1956-1988 [New York: Greenwood Press, 1989], 255). 91. Abram Bergson, “Soviet Economic Slowdown and the 1981-1985 Plan,” Problems of Communism 30 (May-June 1981): 36. See also Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors. Bialer described the economic crisis the Soviet Union faced and predicted younger men would take over and attempt to solve it. 92. On the machinations that lay behind Gorbachev’s selection, see Hedrick Smith, The New Russians (New York: Random House, 1990), 77; and Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, 80-85. Gorbachev's selection was nota sure thing. Had he not been able to pull the ageing Andrei Gromyko over to his side, Viktor Grishin might have become General Secretary. Had that happened, there surely would have been no program of reform and the Soviet Union would probably have survived (Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System and the Demise of the Soviet State,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 [Fall, 2004]: 511).

93. Ed A. Hewett, Reforming the Soviet Economy: Equality versus Efficiency (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1988), 349-350. 94. Archie Brown, “The Gorbachev Era,” 333-334.

95. Janos Kornai, By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 228.

96. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), put it this way: “The insider testimony assembled in this book suggests that the USSR was killed, against the wishes of its ruler, by politics, not economics” (26). As Archie Brown observes, “It was not so much a case of crisis forcing radical reform as of radical reform generating crisis” (Brown, “The Gorbachev Era,” 320). 97. In Russian the word glasnost “is ambiguous. It conveys the idea of publicity rather than of frankness. The publication of selective reports about the weekly Politburo

CHAPTER 2 ¢ The Gang of Four and Their Nemesis 93 meeting is an example of glasnost, but the very fact that the reports are selective and brief shows the limits of the meaning” (Zhores A. Medvedev, Gorbachev [New York: W. W. Norton, 1986], 159). 98. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, 159, 276. 99. The congress would then elect the actual legislative body, the Supreme Soviet. 100. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, 225. 101. Svetlana Savranskaya, “The Logic of 1989: The Soviet Peaceful Withdrawal from Eastern Europe,” in Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), 14-18. 102. FBIS, Soviet Union 3/117, June 18, 1969. In 1976 the assembled parties reconfirmed their rejection of “one leading center” and reaffirmed the theoretical correctness of “national roads” to socialism at a meeting in East Berlin. 103. Compare the 1969 program, which, after asserting that all parties have equal rights,

went on to say that “the communist and workers parties, regardless of some difference of opinion, reaffirm their determination to present a united front in the struggle against imperialism” (FBIS, ibid.). Coming less than a year after the proclamation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, the relative importance of “equal rights” and “united front” seemed clear. 104. Gorbachev, Perestroika, 155-167. 105. FBIS-SOV-81-116, November 24, 1981, G-8.

106. Commenting on the Russo-Hungarian trade agreement of November 12, 1984, finalized in March 1985, Alfred Reisch said, “There can be no doubt that the Soviet Union has succeeded in imposing its will on the much weaker Hungarian regime with a bilateral program that clearly seeks to adjust Hungary’s economic development to the long-range objectives of the Soviet economy” (RFE, Hungarian SR/14, November 29, 1984, 3). Writing late in 1985, Vladimir V. Kusin, an astute observer, found Gorbachev's early policy toward Eastern Europe a nuanced continuation of his predecessors (“Gorbachev and Eastern Europe,” Problems of Communism 35 [January—February 1986]: 39-53). 107. Ilya Zemtsov and John Farrar, Gorbachev: The Man and the System (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 217.

108. Both cited from Ted Kaminski, “Underground Publishing in Poland,” Orbis 32 (Fall 1987): 325. The Warszawski quote is from the underground journal KOS of February 8, 1987; the Zaleski sentiment is presumably from the same period but is not specifically documented by Kaminski. 109. “Gorbachev's Gameplan: The Long View,” in Masterpieces of History, ed. Savranskaya et al., Doc. 17, p. 263. A year and a half later, Gates still had not changed his mind. See the National Intelligence Estimate of April 1989 in ibid., Doc. 57.

110. Anatoly Dobrynin in Kommunist 9 (September 1986), as quoted by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin (New York: Viking, 1990), 205.

111. Zdenék Mlynaf, Can Gorbachev Change the Soviet Union? Tbe International Dimensions of Political Reform (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 123.

112. Robert Kaiser believes that the Reykjavik summit of October 1986 and the return of Sakharov in December of that year convinced American policy makers that Gorbachev was serious (Why Gorbachev Happened, 140, 147-149), but this is refuted by Thomas Blanton, “U.S. Policy and the Revolutions of 1989,” in Masterpieces of

94. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN History, ed. Savranskaya et al., 49-98. Gorbachev told Margaret Thatcher in March 1987 that the Brezhnev Doctrine was outdated and at the Venice summit of Western leaders in June 1987 she argued that Gorbachev was indeed serious, a view strongly supported by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher from early on (Doder and Branson, Gorbachev, 219). See also James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Viking, 2009), which shows

how much better Reagan understood Gorbachev than did his advisors. 113. New York Times, July 6, 1992, A3. 114. See, for example, Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy, 3d ed. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1988), 58. I would like to thank William Bishop of Denison University for this reference.

115. Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991), 113. 116. Information from Alexei Arbatov, who was in Prague in spring 1989 (conversation, June 25, 1991). Jan Urban agrees that the Soviet embassy was quite isolated. Whereas, for example, the oppositionist Urban was sufficiently friendly with the British dep-

uty chief of mission to be having dinner with him on the night of November 17, 1989, it was not until several days later that the Soviet embassy for the first time sent some of its own people onto the streets to check the assessments it had been receiving from Czechoslovak party and security sources (interview, February 15,1992). 117. Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A political history of East Central Europe since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 221-222. 118. Norman Stone, “Looking for a Different Sort of Russia,” Sunday Times [London], November 22, 1987.

CHAPTER 3

a,

The Momentum of Change in Hungary

Mie Gorbachev's prodding sent chills down the spines of the gang of four. He received the cheers of the crowd in April 1987 when he visited Prague, but only nervous smiles from Gustav Husak. When he visited Bucharest shortly thereafter, his discussions with an antagonistic Ceausescu reached such a pitch that security guards entered the conference room to check on the safety of their chief. In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov tried to ignore perestroika and glasnost by claiming that Bulgaria had undertaken those kinds of reforms long ago; and in East Germany, Erich Honecker was sufficiently edgy to ban at least one Soviet publication because it was too critical of the system he stood for. In Poland and Hungary, however, Gorbachev’s initiatives found a creative response. Flexible leaders and civic movements differentiated these two countries from their conservative neighbors. In Poland the evolution of an independent society pioneered by KOR and Solidarity proceeded apace after 1981, despite martial law. By 1989 General Jaruzelski realized that the only way to deal with the severe social and economic problems facing Poland was to enter into an authentic partnership with Solidarity. In Hungary Janos Kadar’s politics of reconciliation permitted the growth of a significant autonomous sector in the Hungarian economy, the reemergence of reformers in the party itself, and the elaboration of a set of popular issues that mobilized urban segments of society in favor of change. The avalanche that swept away the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe began in these two countries.

HUNGARY TURNS ITS ECONOMY WESTWARD Of all the Communist parties in Eastern Europe, the Hungarian was the most reform minded. Perhaps this was because, unlike the Polish party, it had not been destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s. Its ranks contained fewer first-generation peasant apparatchiks, and it lost fewer of its intellectuals to opposition than did the Polish party.! Even in the depths of Kadar’s repressions after 1956 the 95

96 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

government abandoned compulsory deliveries of agricultural produce, and when recollectivization was undertaken in the early 1960s it was done by trying to offer the peasants incentives rather than strictly by brute force. The New Economic Mechanism (NEM) was the most lasting and important economic reform undertaken in Communist Eastern Europe. Despite a step backward in 1972, by the late 1970s Hungary appeared to be prospering. For the first time since World War II, a socialist state began to get decent press in the West about its consumer products, which not only compared favorably with those seen elsewhere in the Soviet bloc but were readily available in decent shops in central Budapest. Communist organizations contrived to hold their meetings in Budapest if possible so that they could combine some retail grazing with their business meetings, while at the same time a Hilton hotel with all the amenities helped convince foreign journalists that Kadar’s Hungary was the least dreary of the East European capitals. Statistically the situation had its positive aspects as well. Between 1970 and 1978 national income, measured in volume of goods produced, increased about 6 percent per year and real consumption rose about 4 percent per year.?

But not far beneath the surface of this apparently successful picture lay some very disquieting difficulties. Not least among them were the disruptions caused by the oil embargo that Arab states imposed in 1973. By 1975 Hungary was forced to begin importing expensive oil from the world market. The Soviets were willing to continue to supply their CMEA partners with energy at a reasonable cost (prices were set at the average of the last five years of world prices, which

amounted to a substantial subsidy to East European users during a period of rising prices) if they would invest in projects designed to increase Soviet energy production. In Hungary’s case this meant sinking substantial investments into the massive Orenburg natural gas complex and the 2,700 mile pipeline that connected it with Eastern Europe. The pipeline succeeded in bringing new energy to Hungary, and to other countries in the region as well, but it was seen by many

Hungarians as having diverted their resources to Soviet needs rather than to their own economic problems.? At the same time, Hungarian foreign trade took a turn for the worse. The Hungarians tended to blame Soviet pressure for their problems, but under conditions in which the government always gave in to pressure for subsidies or other concessions, enterprises had little incentive to scramble in the international arena for export markets and no incentive to limit the importation of goods that would help them meet their quantitative targets. The most egregious example of such a condition was a system of preferential taxation in the iron and steel industry that permitted individual firms to show a “profit” even though the hard currency costs of imported raw materials were greater than the hard currency receipts from the sale of the finished products.4 Under such conditions it was only natural that imports tended to rise uncontrollably. During the 1970s Hungary had a negative balance of trade with convertible currency countries every year but one, and its terms of trade declined by approximately 20 percent.’ Terms of trade constitute a rough approximation of how well an economy is maintaining its competitiveness

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 97

in the world market. A decline of 20 percent means that to sustain the quantitative level of imports Hungary achieved in the early 1970s it had to export 20 percent more of its own goods by the end of the 1970s. In effect, this meant that Hungary was paying excise tax to the world economy of about 20 percent. By 1977 Hungarian economists were able to convince the politicians that something had to be done to correct the foreign debt situation. Between 1970 and 1979 Hungarian debt rose from about $1 billion to $9.1 billion.* Poland and Romania attacked their debt problems by suspending payments, rescheduling, and taking other steps that had long-term negative effects. Poland turned to Soviet trade and Ceausescu decided to pay off his debt completely. Hungary, however, found a more creative solution. In 1982 it became a member of both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which opened the door to a series of bridging and other loans that tided Hungary over its worst debt crisis.

Joining the IMF was easier for Hungary than it would have been for other East European countries because Hungary maintained a solid foreign currency reserve and paid its debts on time. It had already introduced the kind of austerity measures the IMF favors for overextended countries. The central committee explicitly recognized in 1977 that Hungary was going to have to improve its posi-

tion in the world market.” On the basis of the ensuing discussions, in 1979 the politburo reversed the centralizing course adopted in 1972 and reentered the path initially set out by the NEM. It cut back on consumption, squeezed the money supply, lowered the rate of investment, and tried to encourage producers to raise their export levels. In a statement almost diametrically opposed to the one made by Gierek in Poland a few years earlier, Deputy Premier Ferenc Havasi outlined the new policy: “Economic growth, production and development, as well as living

standard improvements, must be subordinated in the interest of improving our international financial balance.”8 In other words, Hungary decided to attempt an opening to the world market a good ten years before the revolutions of 1989.

AUTONOMOUS ECONOMIC ACTIVITY Hungarian leaders were willing to begin another round of reforms in 1979 in part because successes in areas of the economy in which they had permitted the most flexibility over the past twenty years encouraged them. A good example, surprisingly enough, was socialized agriculture. The final campaign to collectivize agriculture took place in Hungary between 1958 and 1961. Although officials used coercion, at the same time they realized that the best way to get peasants working was to make the new cooperatives profitable. Abandoning compulsory crop deliveries, the collectivizers permitted the cooperatives to mechanize on their own rather than through the Stalinist machine tractor stations and replaced the grossly ineffective system of workdays credit with monthly cash wages. It was with considerable surprise that a representative of the agricultural ministry reported in 1960 that “one of our best methods is regular cash advances.”? Most

98 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

significant, in the 1960s cooperatives received the right to enter into auxiliary businesses, which they did with a vengeance, at first trying food processing, then related light industry such as furniture making, quarries, and lumber yards, and eventually completely unrelated and detached businesses, such as producing computer power supplies. Over the years, despite setbacks in the 1970s, these auxiliary enterprises, which were not run by the same rules as state industries but rather as part of the collectives, developed considerable autonomy and often became quite profitable. A second niche in which productivity and output increased through the 1960s and even during the centralizing period of the 1970s was the second economy. The meaning of this term is elusive. There is debate over whether it should encompass only legal activities or also informal activities, which are often technically illegal. Here the term means any economic activity, legal or informal, through which individuals or households obtain income outside the socialized sector.!0 Every economy, no matter how regulated, experiences inefficiencies that present opportunities for enterprising persons to profit. Even in the most restrictive economy, if there are shortages there will be efforts to cope: black markets, bribes, pilfering, slacking off on the job, and working hard after hours for cash payments. In open societies, the range of activities allowed to fill these gaps is wide, and entry into profit-making activities is relatively easy, although far from unregulated. In centrally planned economies, however, the range of permissible

enterprise can be narrow and entry difficult. Despite this, the chronic shortage of goods characteristic of these economies inevitably leads to parallel markets— methods of production and acquisition that fall outside regular channels. The difference between Hungary and its more conservative neighbors, such as the German Democratic Republic, was that the Hungarians broadened the range of permissible activity in parallel markets. As early as 1957 government regulations allowed individuals to lease some service-oriented, state-owned shops and permitted self-employed craftsmen to contract for work in the public sector.!! In some ways, these rules had not significantly affected economic activity, since by 1981 only about 1,900 leased shops, 1,500 of them restaurants, exist-

ed.!2 On the other hand, by that time building cooperatives not directly run by state enterprises were constructing 60 percent of all new apartments.!3 Naturally, as in the other socialist economies, a large number of artisans were making extra money by private work on their own account. By 1982 one observer could write that Hungary was not only “a world of salaried workers, but rather one of small independent workers operating on the rationally and strategically ordered free market. It is increasingly the spirit of enterprise that characterizes the economic strategy of these small independent workers.”4 A third example of autonomous economic activity, and one that had a great deal of influence in convincing reformers that private enterprise could be integrated into their socialist system, was the family-oriented farm. In an arrangement known as the “family work organization,’ cooperatives assigned certain holdings to those who actually worked them rather than treating the peasants

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 99

simply as an agricultural proletariat. This arrangement was particularly effective for animal husbandry. Collectives worked out what amounted to thousands of tiny feed lot arrangements and mini-breeding stations that benefited both sides, with the families growing the stock and the cooperatives processing and marketing the meat. Other enterprising peasants used their small household plots very effectively in other ways, such as by growing tomatoes or other hothouse vegetables for town markets, or mass producing eggs. These activities produced an unexpected pattern of social differentiation. One of the developmental goals of communism was to get marginally employed peasants off the land and into more productive factories where they would form the new proletariat.5 The idea was to turn “the entire population into salaried workers and [to abolish] independent labor.”'* The effort was generally successful, but in the 1950s and 1960s Eastern Europe's rural population declined more slowly than it should have at a time of rapid industrial expansion. Hungary and other countries as well remained “underurbanized” because many peasants used factory employment as simply one aspect of an overall family strategy to maximize their benefits from the centrally planned system. In a typical case the husband might commute a long distance to factory work using public transportation that the regime had created in part to minimize its capital expense of constructing housing. As an employee of the factory he received retirement and other social benefits. Meanwhile, his wife remained a member of the cooperative, thereby retaining the family’s right to a plot and to forage for their cow. Instead of becoming proletarians, these workers adopted an intermediate position—peasants and workers at the same time.1’ In the 1970s Hungary's rural population actually started to increase as marginally urbanized individuals and families who had found “hiding places,” or “parking orbits,” as Ivan Szelényi calls them, began to sense greater opportunity in small-scale but marginally free agriculture rather than in factory employment. The regime’s investment policy in the 1970s, which placed new manufacturing plants around the country rather than concentrating them near Budapest, helped in this process. The old type of family subsistence farm almost completely disappeared, but a vigorous stratum of small-scale farmers turned more and more of its attention to the intensive cultivation of tiny plots, marketing the produce instead of consuming it. Rather than sliding into proletarian status, as the planners had originally anticipated, or staying in some intermediate position as worker peas-

ants, these vigorous businessmen reversed their social vector in the direction of becoming genuine entrepreneurs. Rather than consuming their product or working for a wage, they were accumulating and investing capital, sometimes quite a bit of it by Hungarian standards. Szelényi estimates that a typical rural entrepreneur might have accumulated between $20,000 and $40,000 by the early 1980s, not much by Western standards but equivalent to twenty to forty times the annual salary of an average Hungarian worker.

A fourth arena in which working people had achieved a certain amount of autonomous experience by 1980 was the shop floor of factories. From the

100 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

beginning of centralized planning, one of the basic jobs of management was to conduct “plan bargaining.” The best way to fulfill one’s plan and receive bonuses was to bargain with the bureaucracy for an easy plan. Sociologists investigating Hungarian work conditions in the late 1970s were surprised to find key workers on the shop floor itself conducting similar negotiations. The “countervailing power, as Burawoy and Lukacs put it, that skilled workers possessed permitted them to negotiate with the apparently much more powerful factory administration for better schedules, choice holiday accommodations, and similar perquisites. A number of studies have shown that factory workers could be divided into two groups—these elite workers who found ways to maximize their rewards and the much larger force of regular workers without much power, able only to withhold their labor (i.e., not work very hard).!8 This division mirrored the division in the countryside between the relatively small number of entrepreneurial farmers and the very much larger population of state farm and cooperative members.

By the end of the 1970s, therefore, when the leadership decided that Hungary's economic future depended on restoring some of the reforms of NEM and on turning toward the world market, a significant substratum of enterprise and autonomy already existed in Hungary. This did not constitute exactly a civil society as the Poles thought of it, although sociologist Elemer Hankiss spoke of a “second public sphere” that included the second economy.!® No strikes or dramatic confrontations emotionalized this still inchoate phenomenon, but an active segment of the Hungarian population, perhaps not any smaller than in Poland and certainly larger than in any other East European country, lay in wait, ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities might come its way.

REFORM, AUSTERITY, AND ANXIETY The Twelfth Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers party, held in March 1980, set the new directions for the 1980s—greater democracy and legitimation of the second economy. “We can best strengthen the country’s economic power, ' said Sandor Gaspar, the head of the trade unions’ national council, “if we rely on democracy, on the clash of opinions and interests, and on the increased participation of the working population.”2° Despite the understandable skepticism that greeted calls for greater democracy from a centralizer like Gaspar, the gradual return to favor of reformers in the party did lead toward a modest increase in democracy. Agricultural cooperatives received more leeway in electing their leadership, the national electoral law was changed to require multiple candidates and secret elections, and elected bodies were permitted a larger role at the local level. Politburo member Mihaly Korom characterized this last reform as an effort to fulfill the “commitment by the party to implement the policies of socialist democracy. 2! Elemer Hankiss later said, “We have sufficient reason to suppose that there were people in the political elite who really meant it, who sincerely thought that it was time to make the electoral system more democratic.”2?

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 101

The second significant decision of the Twelfth Congress was to recognize explicitly what everyone had known for a long time: the second economy was a significant asset.23 “During their spare time, said the relevant resolution, “a certain percentage of the workers participate in work that is useful to the national economy and to the individual. This is a supplementary source of our development that ... enhances the growth of the nation’s wealth.”24 Legitimation of the second economy led in 1981 and 1982 to a series of laws authorizing a number of “intermediate property forms.’25 These included simplified procedures for establishing subsidiaries and small spin-off businesses, legalization of associations of enterprises and cooperatives, and an auction of franchises for state-owned restaurants and similar service enterprises to build on the principle established in 1957. Most interesting of the alternate forms of ownership were three new types of small businesses: nonagricultural cooperatives of fewer than one hundred members; business work partnerships, in which no more than thirty persons created a business as a second job; and enterprise business work partnerships, or partnerships among employees of an enterprise that contracted its services back to the enterprise during off-hours. To assist these new enterprises, the government established a number of financial intermediaries, including some oriented toward venture capital, such as The Innovation Fund, The Enterprise Fund, Young Investors Association, and the Small Business Innovations Association.”* In 1983 enterprises received permission to sell bonds to each other, while at the same time Hungary enacted Eastern Europe’s most liberal joint venture regulations. These innovations were very successful. The number of shops leased from the state grew from fewer than 2,000 in 1980 to 11,500 in 1986. The 10 percent of Hungarian restaurants in private hands by 1986 turned an operating profit in that year equal to the entire operating profit of the other 90 percent of Hungarian restaurants that remained in public hands.?” The successes of the work cooperatives and partnerships were equally startling. By 1986 the first of these had grown in number from 200 to 10,000, mostly in engineering, light industry, and construction, while the second had grown from nothing to 11,000. Together these two types of new businesses employed 110,000 persons.?* By 1985 one hundred bond issues existed, and a small bond market had opened in Budapest. The most interesting of the innovations was the enterprise business work partnership. These partnerships constituted the “household plots of industry,” as one central committee member put it.29 Skilled employees could join together to contract their services to the enterprise in which they worked. They retained

their ordinary jobs and kept their ordinary hours, but after quitting time the partnership worked on its own, often performing the same job at the same location. Instead of contracting with an outside firm for a rush order of architectural drawings, for example, firms would contract with one of their own enterprise business work partnerships. Since such contracts tended to be for specialized products and highly skilled services, the same trained workers who had been best able to apply “countervailing power” in the 1970s were best prepared to create the

102 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

new partnerships. This had the tendency to intensify the social and economic divisions between them and ordinary workers, who had neither the technical nor the social skills to put together the complex partnerships. Among the skilled workers, however, the partnerships were very popular. Some large factories had as many as 150 of them, and by the end of 1986, 21,490 partnerships with 267,000 members were adding one-third to one-half of their regular wages to their annual income through work in their partnerships. Managers liked the system too. Not only did they get quality work from the partnerships—productivity was substantially higher than during regular working hours—but they paid them from funds not accounted as wages, thereby increasing their flexibility.3°

By the mid-1980s the various alternate forms of ownership had become a vital part of the Hungarian economy, producing about one-third of the national income.! More important, participants in these forms were forming a new sense of themselves and their possibilities. David Stark has traced these changes in one enterprise work partnership.32 When the eighteen skilled machinists formed this particular partnership their goal was to show that they could produce sophisticated machines without the suffocating and inefficient interference of managers and engineers. Earlier, in selective bargaining on the shop floor, “the tool-makers had sought to get the best price for their time; in establishing the partnership they sought the best price for their skills.” But once they proved they were more efficient and more precise than the plant at large, able to produce to close tolerances for the export market, management started giving them only the most difficult and demanding jobs on which the profit margins were the smallest. Eventually this led to a crisis in which the partnership fired its original representative, who had been one of the most respected machinists, and hired a new one, a young and ambitious engineer who was not a worker at all. At the same time they used their key positions as highly skilled craftsmen to convince management that they should be able to contract outside the factory, and for the first time they began to investigate the market value of the products they made. In other words, from seeking a proof of their worth as workers, the toolmakers had progressed to thinking like businessmen and had begun their exit to the private economy. Hungary, therefore, was structurally very different from Poland. Whereas in Poland an opposition presenting itself through a working-class union sought to create a civil society by cultural means, in Hungary economic reforms introduced by a Communist party were creating a new stratum of quasi-entrepreneurs among factory workers that paralleled a process of bourgeoisification in the countryside. The reform process was also educating many other workers to the pres-

sures of the market and to the norms of pluralist interactions. Hungary proved more successful in attracting foreign investment and in marketizing its economy than Poland in the first few years after 1989 because in Hungary the process was already well under way before 1989, whereas in Poland work structures and consciousness remained only slightly changed in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the alternate forms of ownership in Hungary remained parasitic on the centrally planned system. Few of the new businesses were stand-alone

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 103

enterprises. They depended on the cooperatives or other enterprises to provide the facilities and the supply and distribution networks within which they worked. The mixed forms of ownership were beginning to influence Hungarian society through a process that Ivan Berend calls “hidden pluralization,” but in themselves they were not able to solve the structural problems of the centralized system, since to a certain degree they owed their success to the inefficiencies caused by the regime's inability to solve those problems.33 Looking back, it seems clear that the Hungarian reforms set the stage for relatively good economic development after 1989. But at the time, what most Hungarians noticed was a declining standard of living brought on by the policy of austerity. Kadar was cleverer in dealing with prices than either Gomutka or Gierek, who provoked riots by keeping prices stable for years and then adjusting them suddenly, without warning. In Hungary price changes took place periodically and usually with lengthy preliminary preparations. This more sensible policy had prevented sudden outbursts of rage but not a steady deterioration in morale, since between 1978 and 1984 real wages fell about 7 percent.*4 A significant portion of the population was prospering in the private sector, but a majority was feeling pinched by the falling real value of wages. Rising prices also reduced the value of social benefits, and those on pensions particularly suffered. Almost as important as real losses in creating uneasiness were anxieties about the future. Bankruptcies began in the late 1970s, when the Csepel Steel Trust began laying off workers. In August 1984 the large Office Equipment and Fine Mechanics Enterprise near Budapest closed, reassigning its twelve hundred workers elsewhere; and Tungsram, the large light bulb company purchased after 1989 by General Electric, announced that it had laid off three thousand of its twenty-six thousand workers over the past eighteen months and planned to layoff twelve hundred more shortly.35 Failures of this magnitude were a new experience for Hungary and undercut one of the most popular promises of the socialist regimes, job security. Strangely enough, at the same time real wages were falling and uncertainty increasing, consumption was rising.2° How was such an anomaly possible? The answer was that approximately 75 percent of Hungarians received income from the second economy. To preserve their standard of living Hungarians were frantically working extra hours, very often at what amounted to two full-time jobs. Specialists speculate that the decline in life expectancy of Hungarian men, which began in the late 1970s, can be attributed primarily to the deleterious impact of continuous overwork.37 Working double time as real wages at the primary workplace fell, or seeing purchasing power evaporate and for the first time fearing actual unemployment, ordinary Hungarians in the mid-1980s no longer felt as buoyant as they had a decade earlier.

The Thirteenth Party Congress, held in March 1985, did not offer them much solace. Kadar had to admit that the standard of living had declined, and speaker after speaker criticized the government for its inability to prevent inflation or to provide adequate housing. But the congress took no major new steps,

104. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

instead announcing the continuation of the austerity policy. When Kadar said in his closing remarks that in any event it was necessary to adhere to the principles of “socialist centralism,”’ many realized that the hero of the 1970s, now seventythree years old and starting to decline, was in touch with neither the new vibrancy of the semiprivate sector nor the new energy emanating from the Soviet Union. Speculation began to appear both in the party, where a vigorous discussion was developing over strategies of reform, and in the opposition, which was becoming increasingly defined, whether Kadar would be able to retain his control.

THE DEMOCRATIC OPPOSITION The beginnings of a Hungarian opposition can be traced in the late 1960s to a few individuals like Miklés Haraszti and to the “Budapest School” of humanistic Marxist philosophers. Haraszti was an original, the son of Communist parents who found inspiration as a young man in the New Left of the 1960s, flirted with the North Vietnamese version of communism, and for a time professed Maoism, allin his efforts to find a purer brand of communism for Hungary. The Budapest School is the name given to the group of students surrounding Gyérgy Lukacs, one of Europe's most creative Marxist theorists. Lukacs was a magnetic personality who managed to survive 1956, even though he was minister of culture in Imre

Nagy’s short-lived cabinet. He returned to Budapest University and gathered around himself a particularly brilliant circle of young philosophers. Powerful thinkers as well as clever writers and skillful polemicists, the members of the Budapest School were foremost among those who found the basis for their critical stance in the young Marx. In 1972, when party hardliners reasserted themselves, one of the sacrifices they demanded was a disciplining of the Budapest School, whose reputation, if not actual behavior, seemed to present a threat to the party’s omniscience. When they refused to submit to criticism at a closed party session, eight of Lukacs’s most prominent students lost their university positions and four of them emigrated.3° Not long after that authorities detained the novelist Gyérgy Konrad and the sociologist Ivan Szelényi for writing a book entitled Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.39 The two authors argued that a new class was emerging, just as Milovan Djilas said it would, but that class was the intellectuals, both those in power and those who would like to get into power. “We thought,” Szelényi said later, “that the system would be good if intellectuals had power, that there is nothing wrong

with intellectuals having power—the only problem with socialism is that it is not the intellectuals who have power.”#° Konrad was restrained from publication and Szelényi went into exile. At about the same time economic reformers such as Rezs6 Nyers were being demoted from the politburo. These purges were notable because of their relative rarity. Whereas in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s thousands of intellectuals were working as doorkeepers and window washers and in Romania the enforced calm was almost complete, in Hungary the last significant political trial came in 1973, when

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 105

Miklés Haraszti was sentenced to eight months in prison for having given a few friends copies of his powerful personal account of the debilitating piece-work system he found in a factory where he had worked for six months.*! Occasional unreconciled opponents might end up working for a fire extinguisher company, police might rough up ordinary workers caught writing graffiti, and a few thinkers deemed theoretically threatening, such as Lukacs’s students, might be ostracized, but if one did not overtly challenge the regime it was possible to think moderately independent thoughts and to survive quite well. An identifiable opposition movement, as opposed to dissident individuals, began to cohere in Hungary about the same time as in Poland. In 1976 Hungary's first typewritten samizdat publication appeared, an essay by Ivan Szelényi on housing with an introduction by Janos Kis and Gyérgy Bence. Discussion circles had been meeting for several years, and in 1977 about thirty intellectuals signed a petition in support of Charter 77. In September 1978 these disparate activities took concrete form when the Hungarian version of the “Flying University” held its first lecture, a discussion of the seminal populist thinker Istvan Bibo given by the historian Miklés Szabo. In a short time these Monday night talks, which went on for many years, were being held in mid-town Budapest apartments that could hold as many as four hundred listeners in their separately wired rooms.#2 In 1979 Ottilia Solt and some colleagues launched the Fund for the Assistance to the Poor, Hungary's first independent charitable organization. Of course the fund was also profoundly political, since the very use of the term “the poor” was at that time unacceptable to the regime. “What we really did with the foundation for the poor,” says Haraszti, “was to change the language.”43 People who would never think of entering into opposition were attracted to the idea of helping the poor. Early in 1981 Laszlo Rajk, son of the man of the same name juridically murdered in the purge years and actually a godson of Janos Kadar, began opening his apartment one evening a week to sell oppositional literature.44 Rajk would layout copies of recent publications in this “samizdat boutique,” as he called it, and customers, whose names were never taken, would indicate which ones they wanted and how many copies. During the next seven days Rajk’s team of copiers would reproduce the texts and next week the buyers would return and pick up their purchases. With the coming of Solidarity in Poland, the handful of persons involved in these initiatives began thinking of how they could expand their activities. At the turn of the year 1980-1981, twenty-five of them met in a Budapest apartment to discuss a suggestion that they begin a journal. Despite the many negative opinions expressed, the most poignant of which was that they had no vital issue capable of mobilizing popular support, the meeting led to a year-long series of discussions among a group of about seven persons that in December 1981 produced Hungaryss first and most important opposition journal, Beszél6 (Speaker).45 Just as KOR did in Poland, the editors printed their names and addresses. “We have nothing to hide,” was their motto.

106 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

The key figure in Beszél6 was the Budapest School philosopher Janos Kis, who later became chairman of the political party called the Alliance of Free Democrats and whom friends consider one of the finest minds in Central Europe. Kis set out the journal’s main goal as the encouragement of civil society, which he believed was the only sound basis of genuine democratization. The modest first issue of five hundred, printed in a film critic's summer home outside of Budapest, received considerably more publicity than its tiny print run warranted when the editors thoughtfully sent a copy to Radio Free Europe in Munich. Shortly thereafter the volatile Gabor Demszky, who later became Beszél6’s publisher as well as competitor and who in 1990 became mayor of Budapest, established AB press, the Hungarian equivalent to Vaculik’s Petlice Press. In 1983 Demszky began publishing another opposition journal, Hirmondo (Messenger), which was somewhat less forbidding than the sophisticated Beszélo. The people surrounding Beszélé are usually called the democratic opposition, or “urbanists,” because they consisted primarily of intellectuals from Budapest.*6 In the provinces, the most successful opposition movement grew out of a nativist tradition that emerged and prospered in the 1930s. These populists, as they are often called, found meaning in the Hungarian countryside and its oppressed peasantry.

Hostile to both capitalist democracy and communism, the populists believed that a third way based on indigenous traditions was appropriate for Hungary.” Whereas the democratic opposition tended to be highly educated, of Jewish heritage, and from more or less privileged Marxist backgrounds, the populists tended to be less educated (although not uneducated), from provincial Christian backgrounds, and with only formally Communist resumes. The issue that exercised them in particular was the difficulties Hungarian minorities faced in bordering countries, especially those suffering in Transylvania under Ceausescu's regime. The poet Sandor Cso6ri was one of the most visible populists of the older generation, while the brilliant Zoltan Bird inspired younger sympathizers. In 1985 a group consisting of both urbanists and populists held a clandestine meeting in the small town of Monor.‘8 Still at an amorphous stage of develop-

ment, the two wings of the opposition began to cohere at Monor into distinct entities and at the same time to grow apart. Populist writer Istvan Csurka spoke of moral decay, advocated constrained consent to the Kadar regime, and proposed reliance on a “new Hungarian self-construction,’ while urbanist Janos Kis stressed the idea of human rights and the necessity of asserting them.*? At the same time that this difference in approach was becoming explicit, changes in both the Hungarian economy and the Hungarian Communist party, not to men-

tion the coming to power of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, were setting the stage for bringing these views into the open. Falling real wages were beginning to modify the Hungarian mood from one of self-satisfaction at living in the “hap-

piest barracks in the socialist camp” to one of discontent. Over the next three years these discontents crystallized in two general areas: the party itself and in the opposition. The party began to change from within and the opposition began to formulate popular causes in a way that mobilized the public.

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 107

PARTY REFORMERS Reformers such as the economist Rezs6 Nyers resurfaced within the party in the late 1970s. In 1982 Imre Pozsgay, who had written a dissertation some years previously with surprisingly pro-Western views, became chairman of the Patriotic People’s Front (PPF), the party’s mass organization, which he began to use as a platform for advocating reform.5° Very much like in Poland at the same time,

the term “pluralism” crept into party discussion. In 1985 an interviewer for Mozgo Vilag (Moving World) could say that the term had become a “fashionable expression.” But in 1985 pluralism did not mean multiparty pluralism, a concept that still seemed unrealistic and utopian, but socialist pluralism, which meant “monism moderated by pluralistic elements,’ as one advocate put it.5! The elections of June 1985, the first held under the 1983 law that required multiple candidates, provided both an example of what “socialist pluralism” meant in real life and an indication of what kind of pressures for self-activation bubbled beneath the surface. For this election, authorities adopted the principle proposed in 1968 for Czechoslovakia, assigning the National Front, or in Hungary's case the PPF, the task of running the nomination process, which was open except for the stifling stipulation that all candidates had to adhere to the PPF’s platform. Direct interference kept the most radical candidates from achieving nomination, but the process was still vigorous enough so that about half the constituencies nominated independent candidates, often directors of agricultural cooperatives who were perceived as fighting the bureaucracy despite their party membership. Forty-three independent candidates entered parliament and a number of prominent figures, including a former prime minister, went down to defeat.52 It was not exactly democracy, but the elections produced more political mobilization than Hungary had seen since 1956 and more real differences of viewpoint in the Hungarian parliament than existed at the time in, for example, Mexico. In 1989 this parliament was the one that adopted the revolutionary changes that finished communism in Hungary.*?

Hungarys administered democratization fit well with the new thinking coming from the Soviet Union. The Hungarian press was very positive about perestroika, which the Soviets had formally adopted early in 1986, and it became downright enthusiastic in June 1986 when Gorbachev visited Budapest. Gorbachev showed his interest in Hungarian reform shortly thereafter by sending a delegation of Soviet economists, headed by one of his most brilliant reform minds, Abel Aganbegyan, to Budapest to discuss the Hungarian experience with Rezs6 Nyers and his team. By 1987, the question in Hungary was not so much reform versus recentralization, but rather what sort of reform to implement and how fast it should proceed. The main stumbling block now became the old reformer himself, Janos Kadar, whose health was beginning to fail.54 In the new conditions of the 1980s, Kadar looked more like the child of the Stalinist era that he actually was than the moderate who had found a way to make Hungary prosperous. Crowding him

108 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

were two sorts of reformers, those like Karoly Grész, who believed that somehow

the economy could be saved without damaging the right or ability of the party to rule, and more radical advocates of pluralization, like Pozsgay and Nyers. Grosz saw economic reform as the solution to the political problem; Pozsgay and Nyers saw political reform as the precondition to the solution of the economic problems. Late in 1986 Pozsgay began the debate that led to 1989 with a frontal attack

entitled “Turning Point and Reform,” a report he commissioned on behalf of the PPF.55 This remarkable document listed the serious economic difficulties Hungary was experiencing: the squandering of labor, energy, raw materials, and capital; the inability to adjust to world trends; and wasteful investment allocation. It went on to make a startling proposal to fix them: introduce the profit motive through marketizing reforms. Admitting the failure of centralized planning, the

sixty-page study advocated breaking up the large vertically organized monopolies, permitting companies to issue stock, creating a stock exchange, opening Hungary entirely to the world economy, and permitting prices and wages to fluctuate according to supply and demand. For this to happen, the report concluded, political change was needed. No party should be above the law, individual rights should be protected, and the government should be responsible to the national parliament, not to the party.%°In other words, in 1987 reformers within the party, along with their populist allies, were calling for the kind of liberalizing changes in the economy that actually appeared in the 1990s. Realizing that the terms of public debate were changing, Beszél6 published its own proposal for change in June 1987 entitled “A New Social Contract.”>7 If “Turning Point and Reform” advocated a turn toward capitalism in the economic sphere, Janos Kis and his two coauthors advocated a turn toward social democracy in the political arena. “A New Social Contract” included ideas whose pedigree went back to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, such as worker self-management and neutrality in foreign affairs, but central to its proposal was the separation of powers. In 1987 it was still necessary to assume that the party would continue to be a powerful force, so the authors of “The New Social Contract” suggested that the party become the executive power, responsible for putting laws into effect and for conducting foreign policy, but that the legislature become the true representative of the people, freely elected, authorized to establish public policy through legislation, and competent to call the government to account. They also proposed

an independent court system. Clearly several steps beyond socialist pluralism, “The New Social Contract” sought a new legal and constitutional basis for pluralism based on the American example, or as the Hungarians might put it, on Montesquieu. It is doubtful such a scheme could have worked in practice, at least insofar as the party retained its Leninist coloration, but “The New Social Contract” was an important step in the evolution of one form of oppositionist thinking from reform Marxism to real pluralism. The declining Kadar found it difficult to respond to the reformers in his party

and to the challenges of the democratic opposition, but he gave no indication

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 109

that he had any intention of stepping down. In what some have interpreted as an effort to embarrass his most serious rival, in June 1987 he elevated Karoly Grosz to chairman of the council of ministers, where presumably economic difficulties would bring him to grief.58 Rather than drifting with events, however, the workaholic Grész proved to be a capable administrator and leader. He criticized both the bureaucracy and the workers, the first for mishandling the economy, the second for low productivity. Creating a stabilization plan of his own, he began working within the committee structure of parliament and stressing the functions of the state rather than those of the party, giving the impression that perhaps the government, which he headed, should be separated from the party, which he did not, so that it could put his program into effect. In a strange way, Grosz’s approach to the legislature complemented the proposal of “The New Social Contract” to enhance the parliament’s role. To this point the Hungarian legislature had been such a rubber stamp that the first time

someone had wanted to register a “nay” vote, it turned out that there was no procedure established to count votes. Renewed interest in the legislature's role came to the surface in September 1987, when Grosz prepared a proposal to install

a turnover tax, similar to that levied by West European states, and an income tax. The proposal had economic merit, but on the other hand the income tax in particular brought home to the population at large the enormous cost of the failures of centralized planning. One hundred prominent intellectuals, many of them never previously identified with opposition, sent an open letter to each member of parliament, which was just convening to consider the measures. “It must become possible to decide issues like sharing out of unavoidable sacrifices by means of open debate,” the letter said. Only real marketization economically and full democratization politically would create the appropriate conditions for improvement, it continued. “Decisive initiatives are demanded.”59

At first Grosz summarily rejected the right of the signatories even to send such a letter, and the legislature passed his tax bills routinely without opposition. But in the newly mobile atmosphere of Hungarian politics, Grész could not sustain his rejection of the right to make proposals to the legislature. Almost immediately he had to state publicly that he really wanted to continue a dialogue with the opposition. “We do not have a monopoly of wisdom to solve Hungary's problems,” he said not very convincingly. One month later he described lack of political competition as “one of the shortcomings of [Hungary's] political life.” He did not have long to wait for that lack to be remedied. In September 1987,

the populists brought about 170 sympathizers together in the unlikely small town of Lakitelek to discuss Imre Pozsgay’s “Turning Point and Reform” and to hear Pozsgay advocate constitutional guarantees for free speech. This was an important moment in the maturation of Hungarian pluralism because it clarified the differences between the democratic opposition and the populist opposition. At the time feelings ran high, since the democratic opposition, which was not invited to Lakitelek, saw the meeting as an effort to undermine the solidarity of the antiregime forces, while the populists thought that the manifesto “A New

10 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Social Contract” was an effort of the urbanists to write a manifesto for the entire opposition with which they did not agree. Both sides were right, but precisely for that reason Lakitelek also presaged the pluralization of Hungarian politics.® The Communist reformer Pozsgay, angling perhaps for his own possible rise to power, was building support among the more conservative non-Communists in preparation for the moment when he might ask them to join in a centrist coalition against the hard-line Communists on the right and the democratic opposition on the left.

THE OPPOSITION FINDS ITS VOICE If 1987 was the year in which Hungarians started inching down the slope of political reform, 1988 was the year they slipped over the edge of the cliff. In 1987 even

Janos Kis believed that “a multi-party system is still a distant dream.” But by the end of 1988 Kadar had been deposed, dozens of new clubs and organizations had appeared, the regime was on the verge of permitting political parties, and the Hungarian Socialist Workers party had moved away from its claim to be the sole legitimate political force.*3 Struggles over power and debates about declining real income and low productivity occupied party members, but during 1988 the opposition finally found the issues it had lacked up until that point. Three major campaigns created the psychological substrate of their eventual success: environmental opposition to the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Dam; concern over Hungarians living elsewhere, particularly in Romania; and struggle for control of the symbolic representations of the national past.

In 1977 Czechoslovakia and Hungary signed an agreement to construct a huge system of dams, reservoirs, and canals over a 138-mile stretch of the Danube River that ran through their two countries. The massive project, first proposed in the Stalinist era and quite in the tradition of gargantuan heavy industrial investments, was designed according to the apex principle. Instead of operating continuously, water would be discharged twice daily through the dam at Gabcikovo in Czechoslovakia, creating a fifteen-foot-high swell that would continue down a diversion channel to a second dam at Nagymaros, where it would be stopped and used a second time for generating power.*4

In 1983 Kadar finally gave the go-ahead for construction. The following January, after a government representative failed to show up for a public debate on the dams’ substantial environmental impact, a handful of Hungarian environmentalists formed the Danube Circle to fight the project. Quickly the Circle

gathered about ten thousand signatures supporting their argument that the dams would completely disrupt the ecology of the region, ruin the aquifers, and flood the historic Hungarian capital of Visegrad.% During that year and the next other small protest movements took up the issue. Their agitation, as well as costbenefit studies suggesting that Hungary would increase its energy production only modestly through the project, helped the government decide to stretch out the Nagymaros dam’s construction, but it did not give up the idea.

CHAPTER 3 e The Momentum of Change in Hungary _ lll

Late in 1985 an announcement that Hungary had signed an agreement with Austria to construct its portion of the system stunned the Danube Circle. The Austrians had wanted to build their own Danube power project, but when environmental opposition made that impossible in Austria they offered to finance most of the Nagymaros dam in return for receiving 70 percent of the construction contracts and 1.2 million kilowatts of electricity a year for twenty years after completion, which was essentially all of Nagymaros’s production.%* This announcement greatly dispirited the environmentalists, who now believed their cause lost, but in February 1986 they nonetheless held their first small demonstration march along the river, which the police managed to disperse quietly, and took out a full-page advertisement in the Viennese paper Die Presse to put some pressure on Austrian consciences. The democratic opposition joined the dam issue not only because it was

one they could believe in but because they found that a significant number of people otherwise unwilling to enter into political debates, to say nothing of becoming oppositionists, were willing to come forward on this issue. In September 1988 they were able to bring thirty thousand people onto the streets of Budapest, while at the same time several members of the legislature began demanding that the issue be put to a national referendum. When a governmental agreement to discuss the dam at the October 1988 legislative session came to nothing, a rash of demonstrations produced a petition of protest containing seventy thousand signatures.°”7 The contrast with Czechoslovakia, which tolerated little or no opposition to the dam, suggests how far Hungary had come by the end of 1988.

The populist wing of the opposition found the alleged mistreatment of Hungarians living outside Hungary, particularly in Transylvania, a useful issue. When Nicolae Ceausescu announced a village reconstruction plan, which proposed to bulldoze thousands of traditional villages and to replace them with “modern” cement apartment complexes, many Hungarians interpreted the plan as an effort to destroy Hungarian culture in Transylvania, although in the end no Hungarian villages were actually razed. Still, the difficult position of Hungarian Protestants and Catholics in Orthodox Romania and the restrictions placed on Hungarian cultural figures there all were grist for the opposition press. An influx of refugees, who by 1987 were slipping across the Hungarian/Romanian border in substantial numbers, inflamed the situation. In that year a small group of activists created a refugee aid group; in February 1988, five hundred people gathered at the Romanian embassy in Budapest to protest Ceausescu’s policies; and in June 1988, some thirty thousand people demonstrated in Budapest against the village reconstruction plan and the Hungarian government's lack of action, the largest demonstration in Hungary since 1956. Anti-Romanian demonstrations the government did not find unsettling. In fact, the government tried to co-opt the anti-Romanian feeling for its own purposes. But demonstrations on unauthorized holidays, the “struggle over public

2 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

memory as Tamas Hofer called it, almost unhinged the regime.*’ After coming to power the Communist government, quite naturally, had installed its own holidays—Liberation Day on April 4, May Day on May 1, Constitution Day on August 20, and October Revolution Day on November 7. But in the 1980s the opposition began to attempt celebrations on other days: March 15, which was the traditional national holiday commemorating the Hungarian Revolution of 1848; June 16, the day on which Imre Nagy, leader of the 1956 uprising, had been executed; and October 30, the traditional date for the beginning of the 1956 rev-

olution. All three dates had the added emotional power of being anti-Russian, because in all three cases Hungarians fighting for national independence had been crushed by Russian (or Soviet) troops. In 1985 the government permitted a small group of students to demonstrate on March 15, even directing apartment managers to put out flags for the occasion. But the next year police attacked students who attempted to march and arrested a number of them. After a relatively subdued demonstration in 1987, in 1988, despite detention of eight leading members of the opposition, some ten thousand people turned out for the March 15 demonstration. The day of Imre Nagy’s execution proved an even more volatile date. The government was very sensitive to any efforts to reinterpret what it characterized as the “counterrevolutionary’ and “reactionary” revolt of 1956. Not only did the regime's legitimacy depend on the legitimacy of the Soviet intervention, but since Janos Kadar was directly implicated in Nagy’s execution, any reevaluation of 1956 presented a personal problem for him.” On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution (October 30, 1986) the police took extraordinary precautions to insure that the opposition would not use the occasion for a hostile demonstration. But in trying to defuse the situation by a media campaign that passed the blame for 1956 and its aftermath primarily onto the shoulders of a “clique” surrounding Matyas Rakosi, the old Stalinist leader, the regime only served to call further attention to the event. Its defensiveness could not compare in emotional impact with the opposition’s much more powerful presentation of the revolution simply as a patriotic uprising of the Hungarian people in defense of the nation. By careful monitoring, the government was able, both in 1987 and in 1988, to prevent large demonstrations on June 16, but it could not make the issue go away. The opposition insured it would not when at the 1988 demonstration, Miklés Vasarhelyi, an old associate of Nagy’s and now a vigorous member of the democratic opposition, announced the creation of the Committee for Historical Justice, consisting primarily of relatives of the executed leaders from 1956. Later that year Judit Ember’s publication of eleven hours of filmed interviews with surviving family members of the Nagy group capped a flood of personal reminiscences about the period. By the end of 1988 the only position acceptable to the democratic opposition was the full rehabilitation of all participants and victims of repression in 1956, a possibility the government continued to reject as out of the question.

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 113

PARTY REFORMERS TAKE CONTROL AND OPPOSITION PARTIES FORM In May 1988 the Hungarian Socialist Workers party finally, after a long spring of obvious maneuvering and speculation, relieved the increasingly senile Janos Kadar of his position as general secretary, bumping him up to the purely decorative and newly created title of president of the party. Karoly Grdész, backed by a restructured politburo including Pozsgay and Nyers, replaced him. In retrospect Grosz proved to be a transitional figure, but at the time his accession was a major event, welcomed in both the East and the West. In economic matters Gr6ész was a pragmatist. “I want a Hungary that is open, integrated into the world and that is in the mainstream of ... intellectual and economic trends,” he said. In politics he was in the traditional mold. Democratization would take place in Hungary only “in the context of a one-party system,” he asserted.”° The special brutality with which the police broke up the small June 16 demonstration in 1988 lent substance to those words, as did Grosz’s description of that demonstration as an “incitement toward fascist propaganda, chauvinism and irredentism.”7! With the accession of the reformers, however, a Hungarian perestroika began in earnest. Imre Pozsgay was put in charge of summing up the party's experience of the past twenty years and preparing a program for the next twenty, which guaranteed that the pressure for reform would increase. Pozsgay also held responsibility in the politburo for the media. Editors accordingly found they needed less and less self-restraint to stay out of trouble. In July 1988 the party drastically cut back on the nomenklatura, the list of jobs for which party approval was needed, and Grosz announced that Hungary would soon adopt a law on associations that in principle would permit opposition parties to form. By fall the official press was publishing stories about strikes and similar formerly forbidden subjects, and in November the party relinquished control over the national youth organization. Finally, in December, bowing to pressure, the government announced that March 15 would henceforth be a national holiday. The new openness under Grosz led to a proliferation of clubs and associations during 1988.72 At the time, the Democratic Trade Union of Academic and Scientific Workers (Tudornanyos Dolgozék Demokratikus Szakszervezete— TDDSz), billed as the first independent trade union in Eastern Europe since Solidarity, received a great deal of attention because of the Polish experience, but several other organizations turned out to be more important. In September 1988 the same group of populist figures who had met with Pozsgay in Lakitelek the previous year and who had met regularly ever since returned to Lakitelek to create the Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Forum—MDEF). They even received permission to publish a newspaper sympathetic to their cause, Hitel (Credit, so called to resonate with a book written in the nineteenth century by the aristocratic liberal Istvan Széczenyi). Earlier in the year a number of embryonic groupings of the democratic opposition came together to create the Network of Free Initiatives, which quickly spawned the Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad

1l4 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Demokratak Sz6vetsége—SzDSz—pronounced SDS). The Free Democrats were

a Western-oriented liberal counterpart to the more nationalist and populist Democratic Forum. Under their president Janos Kis they advocated Europeanstyle democracy and Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Another important group that formed in 1988 was the Alliance of Young Democrats, usually called by its Hungarian acronym FIDESz (Fiatal Demokratak Szévetsége— pronounced FEE-dess). Designed as an alternative to the official Communist youth organization, FIDESz restricted its membership to those between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. “FIDESz wants to represent three basic values,” one of its organizers said: “Nation, Socialism, and Democracy,’ of which the last was the most important.?3 Initially somewhat to the left of the Free Democrats, FIDESz also stood squarely behind the creation of a pluralist society in Hungary. The Democratic Forum (MDF), the Free Democrats (SzDSz), and the Young Democrats (FIDESz) became the three main political parties of the post-1989 transition, but they were far from the only new organizations founded in 1988. Groups ranged from the Stalinist Ferenc Miinnich Society, consisting of old-line centralizers, through the short lived New March Front, founded with the help of Rezs6 Nyers to rally liberal reformers close to the government, to the Independent Smallholders’ party and the Social Democratic party, recreated from remnants of the past, and smaller movements such as the Republican Circle, the Openness Club, and literally dozens of others. Most of these organizations were very small. The largest among them, the Democratic Forum, claimed only about twelve thousand members by mid-1989, while the Free Democrat’s claimed only four thousand and the Young Democrats two thousand, almost all of these students and intellectuals in Budapest. But together they represented an unprecedented flourishing of political pluralism in Hungary and in Eastern Europe.

GORBACHEV GIVES THE GREEN LIGHT The quickening of economic and political ferment in Hungary in 1988 was indigenous, dependent on developments peculiar to Hungary, but during that year the Soviet leadership passed an increasing number of signals that it was prepared to accept major changes.” While on a tour of the United States in mid-1988 Abel Aganbegyan stressed the Soviet Union’s need for a free “commodity market” regulated by supply and demand, advocated introducing market mechanisms, and proposed putting Soviet enterprises on a profit-and-loss basis.75 About the same time Oleg Bogomolov, another of Gorbachev's chief advisors, said at a meeting in the United States that “the administrative-state model of socialism, established

in the majority of East European countries during the 1950s under the influence of the Soviet Union, has not withstood the test of time” and admitted that the “hegemonic aspirations of the Soviet leadership” had deformed socialism in Eastern Europe.” From June 28 to July 1, 1988, the Soviet party held its Nineteenth All-Union

Party Conference, surely one of the most important it ever held. Gorbachev

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 115

pursued two tactics at the conference. On one hand, he attempted to solidify his position as the most powerful figure in the Soviet Union by creating the office of president, to which he was duly elected later, and on the other hand he proposed the creation of a new legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, that would select the Supreme Soviet after haying been elected itself by open and contested elections. Answering Gorbachev’s summons for “lively and demanding” legislative sessions rather than ones filled with “long-winded speeches,” delegates to the Nineteenth Conference offered proposals that were nothing short of astonishing.77 One delegate rose to demand the resignation of Politburo member Andrej Gromyko and three other old-line leaders; another called the leaders of Uzbekistan criminals; and dozens of speakers complained about living conditions, national slights, censorship, and everything else they could think of. More amazing, a good deal of this was televised to the entire nation. For the first time ever Soviets in 1988 saw their leaders debating real differences. When Gorbachev's proposals were adopted at the end, the vote was not unanimous. East European leaders watched the Nineteenth Conference closely. Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceausescu rejected its message completely. But talk about democratization, “the all-around enrichment of human rights,” establishment of “the rule of law,” and separation of party functions from those of the state could only persuade Hungarians that the Soviets supported the increasing pace of reform in their country. Gorbachev's military policy reinforced this growing suspicion that the Soviet Union would not intervene with force. Late in 1987 the Soviets made it clear they were looking for a way out of their debilitating and demoralizing war in Afghanistan, and in February 1988 Gorbachev announced Soviet troops would be leaving. The first troops actually left on May 15. When Grosz visited Moscow just after the Nineteenth Party Conference Gorbachev

apparently told him that the Soviet Union even intended to withdraw some of its troops from Hungary, where some sixty thousand soldiers had been “temporarily stationed” since 1946. By the end of the year the two countries had reached an agreement to do so, and the first Soviet troops boarded their trains on April 25, 1989. If these and other hints that the Soviet Union had no intention of intervening militarily in Eastern Europe were not clear enough, Gorbachev made them so at his United Nations speech of December 7, 1988, which can be taken as his official repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. “It is obvious,” he said, “that force and the threat of force cannot be and should not be an instrument of foreign policy.... Freedom of choice is [mandatory,] a universal principle, and it should know no exceptions.... The growing variety of options for the social development of different countries is becoming an increasingly tangible hallmark of these processes. This applies to both the capitalist and the socialist systems.’78 Given all these green lights, the surpris-

ing thing is not that Hungary continued on its path toward pluralization but that with the exception of Poland it was the only East European country to do so, at least for the moment.

1l6 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

THE REFORMERS WIN THE BATTLE FOR HISTORICAL MEMORY By early 1989 the more radical reformers in the party were gaining the upper hand. The legislature finally passed a law on associations that would permit the creation of political parties, and in January Pozsgay leaked a central committee historical commission report calling the 1956 uprising a “popular uprising against an oligarchic system of power which had humiliated the nation.” Going even further, Pozsgay asserted that the socialist path “was wrong in its entirety,” surely a remarkable statement for a member of the politburo. Groész instantly rebuked Pozsgay for his statement, but the Soviets did not back him and he could not make his rebuke stick. This is the moment when Pozsgay realized that the Soviet Union was not going to intervene, no matter what happened.”? A few weeks later, when his report appeared in print, it said, “Under the Stalin regime the ideal of international com-

munism was turned into a merciless imperial program. In the shadow of this endeavor, Marxist humanism completely vanished.” The system Stalin installed was built on “bloody dictatorship, bureaucratic centralism, fear and retribution.”8°

The central committee never actually adopted this report, but it was perfectly clear that a significant portion of the party had moved from a position of “socialist pluralism” to a position of rejecting the basis of its own existence. The

central committee confirmed that this indeed was the case when in February 1989 it agreed to eliminate the phrase “the Marxist-Leninist party of the working class is the leading power of society” from the draft constitution it was preparing. Since the Leninist claim that the party, as the vanguard of the proletariat, was the sole repository of truth constituted the legitimating basis of the hyperrationalist system, the Hungarian reformers now seemed to have staked their future on their ability to control the emerging pluralism and to devise an electoral scheme

that would permit them to retain power. The hyperrational pathway from the Enlightenment was coming to an end.

The outcome of the battle of the holidays suggested that retaining power would be a difficult task, since in February 1989 the government totally caved in, not merely permitting a celebration on March 15 but adopting it as a national holiday in place of November 7 (the traditional date for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia) and deciding to permit the family of Imre Nagy and several other victims of 1956 to ceremonially rebury them on June 16, 1989. The opposition, emboldened and vigorously organizing themselves to be prepared for the elections they now anticipated would be coming in 1990, turned the first of these holidays into a magnificently symbolic celebration. Actually there were, in effect, three celebrations on March 15, 1989. The first was the official government ceremony, for which the quite respectable figure of thirty thousand turned out. Second was the completely unpolitical and anticelebrational movement of some two hundred thousand Hungarians who used the holiday weekend and the relaxed border regulations to travel the 150 miles to Vienna, where they paralyzed the center of the city in a massive shopping splurge.

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 117

The third celebration was a march of some one hundred thousand persons organized by the opposition movements in Budapest.’! Organizers meticulously planned this march so that over a five-hour period it stopped at six locations in central Budapest that had significant links to both Hungarian revolutions, the one of 1848 and the one of 1956. For instance, the first stop was the statue of Sandor Petofi, the poet of the 1848 revolution whose statue marked the spot where the demonstration of October 23, 1956, started. The last stop was Batthyany Square, the traditional end point of antigovernment demonstrations in 1956 and once again a memorial to a hero of the 1848 revolution. The government had placed its water cannons along the parade route in anticipation of intervention, but in the end it chose to interpret this clever and ambiguous symbolic display as a national historical celebration that was not inconsistent with its rule. The opposition saw

it as a massive morality play. By touching on as many interlinked markers of Hungarian history as possible, it hoped to rekindle memories of an independent national past interrupted by war and communism. Whether their interpretations of 1848 and 1956 could stand the test of historical analysis is less important than

their success in finding the appropriate symbols and rituals in the Hungarian cultural tool kit to reshape public memory to the disadvantage of the regime.*? The last in this series of public demonstrations that capped the Hungarian declaration of independence from post-Stalinist norms took place on June 16, 1989.83 A massive funeral organized by the liberal opposition, designed in part by Laszlo Rajk, and attended by more than two hundred thousand people (but only by three invited members of the government), reburied not only the remains of Imre Nagy and his colleagues, but the entire Kadarian pretense that Communist Hungary had been an independent national state. The somber and sometimes

even tearful mood of the huge crowd testified to the depth of the emotional burden of powerlessness and humiliation that Hungarians had felt since 1956. With Gorbachev beaming unseen in the background, the Soviet press correctly reported that Nagy’s humane reburial served “the purpose of national reconciliation and rallying which is so necessary now for the Hungarian people.’*4

NOTES 1. Janina Frentzel-Zagorska, “Civil Society in Poland and Hungary,” Soviet Studies 42 (1990): 765-766.

2. Gabor Révécz, Perestroika in Eastern Europe: Hungary's Economic Transformation, 1945-1988 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 99.

3. Paul Marer, “The Political Economy of Soviet Relations with Eastern Europe,” in Soviet Foreign Policy in a Changing World, ed. Robbin F. Laird and Erik P. Hoffmann (New York: Aldine Publishing Co., 1986), 576; John P. Hardt, “Soviet Energy Policies in Eastern Europe,” in Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe, ed. Sarah Mieklejohn Terry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 202-205.

4. Thomas Vajna, “Problems and Trends in the Development of the Hungarian New Economic Mechanism: A Balance Sheet of the 1970s,” in The East European Economies

118 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN in the 1970s, ed. Alec Nove, Hans-Hermann Hohmann, and Gertraud Seidenstecher (London: Butterworths, 1982), 185. 5. Paul Marer, “Hungary’s Balance of Payments Crisis and Response,” in East European Economies: Slow Growth in the 1980's, Volume 3: Country Studies on Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia (Washington, D.C.: Joint Economic Committee, 1986), 300. 6. Marer, “Hungary's Balance of Payments Crisis,” 301, 320. 7. Ivan Berend, Hungarian Economic Reforms, 1953-1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 241. 8. Quoted by Edward A. Hewett, “The Hungarian Economy: Lessons of the 1970s and Prospects for the 1980s,” in East European Economic Assessment: Part 1-Country Studies, 1980 (Washington, D.C.: Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 1981), 512-513.

9. Berend, Hungarian Economic Reform, 103. Cooperative pay under the Stalinist system was calculated in “workday” equivalents, which one accumulated over the year. If the cooperative made a profit, which was not always the case, it would be split proportionally according to workday credits accumulated. Skilled work, such as tractor driving, received many more credits per day than ordinary unskilled labor, such as milkmaid. The new method introduced in the late 1950s paid cooperative members a cash monthly wage at 90 percent of the expected rate and then split any profits at the end of the year. 10. This follows Istvan R. Gabor, “Second Economy and Socialism: The Hungarian experience,’ in Edgar L. Feige, The Underground Economies: Tax Evasion and Information Distortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 339-352, but emphasizes the term informal rather than illegal. Informal economic strategies may be illegal, but they are not antisocial or criminal in intent. For a stimulating discussion of informal strategies see Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). On the other hand, David Stark argues that “capitalism’s informal economy and socialism’s second economy are not functional equivalents or structural counterparts” (“Bending the Bars of the Iron Cage: Bureaucratization and Informalization in Capitalism and Socialism,” Sociological Forum 4 [1989]: 637-664). 11. They did not do this to introduce market mechanisms or private ownership but as part of their view that leases of publicly owned assets in service enterprises would be a socialist way of replacing capitalist ownership. See Istvan Kemény, “The Unregistered Economy in Hungary,” Soviet Studies 34 (1982): 356-357. 12. Berend, Hungarian Economic Reforms, 284. 13. Andrew Felkay, Hungary and the USSR, 1956-1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 252.

14. Kemény, “The Unregistered Economy in Hungary,” 358. 15. The following relies on Ivan Szelényi, Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 16. Kemény, “The Unregistered Economy in Hungary,” 356.

17. This was a common phenomenon throughout Eastern Europe. See, for example, Andrei Simic, The Peasant Urbanites: A Study of Rural-Urban Mobility in Serbia (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). 18. Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs, “Mythologies of Work: A Comparison of Firms in State Socialism and Advanced Capitalism,” American Sociological Review 50 (1985): 733.

CHAPTER 3 « The Momentum of Change in Hungary 119 19. Susanne Klausen, “First Society, Second Society: Mutual Discontents—An Interview with Elemer Hankiss,” East European Reporter 3, no. 1 (1988): 63-65. 20. Quoted by Jorg K. Hoensch, A History of Modern Hungary, 1867-1986, trans. Kim Traynor (New York: Longman, 1988), 251. 21. Peter A. Toma, Socialist Authority: The Hungarian Experience (New York: Praeger, 1988), 56.

22. Elemer Hankiss, “Demobilization, Self-Mobilization and Quasi-Mobilization in Hungary, 1948-1987,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 3 (1989): 144.

23. This decision was part of a process that began in 1978 and was only finally implemented in 1982 (Rudolf L. Tékés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform,

Social Change and Political Succession [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 113).

24. Felkay, Hungary and the USSR, 252.

25. David Stark, “Coexisting Organizational Forms in Hungarys Emerging Mixed Economy,’ in Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe,

ed. Victor Nee and David Stark (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 141.

26. Paul Marer lists thirteen such agencies in “Economic Reform in Hungary: From Central Planning to Regulated Market,” East European Economies: Slow Growth in the 1980s (Washington, D.C.: Selected papers submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 1986), 293-297. 27. Berend, Hungarian Economic Reforms, 284-285. 28. Révész, Perestroika in Eastern Europe, 115-116. 29. Stark, “Hungary's Emerging Mixed Economy,” 143. 30. Stark, “Hungary's Emerging Mixed Economy,” 143, 147. 31. Gabor gives a much higher estimate, calculating that “the second economy must be a source of income of similar importance as the first economy,” but I think that is going too far (Gabor, “Second Economy,” 356). 32. David Stark, “Work, Worth, and Justice in a Socialist Mixed Economy,” Program on Central and Eastern Europe, Working Paper Series no. 5, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, n.d. 33. Berend, Hungarian Economic Reform, 289. 34. Marer, “Hungary's Balance of Payments Crisis,” 313. 35. Keesing’s, 33,679. 36. Using 1978 as 100, by 1984 real wages had dropped to 94.9, whereas real consumption had risen to 108.3 (Marer, “Hungary’s Balance of Payments Crisis,” 313-314). 37. The World Health Organization’s Statistics Annual for 1987 showed Hungarian men to have the shortest life expectancy of any of the thirty-three developed countries covered (84). 38. The eight were Gyérgy Bence, Ferenc Fehér, Andras Hegediis, Agnes Heller, Janos Kis, Gyérgy Markus and his wife Maria, and Mihaly Vajda. The older ones, Fehér and Heller, who were married, and the two Markuses went into exile, while the younger ones stayed in Hungary. Fehér, who Vajda says was the “politician” among the group and who was on good personal terms with party ideological chief Gyorgy Aczél, was not among those fired, but he immediately resigned in solidarity with his colleagues (Mihaly Vajda, interview, March 2, 1992).

39. Gyérgy Konrad and Ivan Szelényi, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

120 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

40. Ivan Szelényi, “The Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project: An Auto-critical Reflection on The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power,” Politics and Society 15 (1986-1987): 113. See also Katherine Verdery et al., “A Symposium: Rereading The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power,’ Theory and Society 34, no. 1 (2005): 1-32. Szelényi thought intellectuals in power would be a good thing. At almost exactly the same time, Irving Kristol, father of neo-conservatism in the United States, was arguing that a “new class” of intellectuals (i.e., scientists, teachers, social workers, city planners, etc.) was seeking the power in the United States to restrict free markets

through influence in the state. Kristol thought this would be a bad thing (Jonathan Cohn, “This Won't Hurt a Bit: Health Care Reform for Dummies,” The New Republic, February 18, 2009: 16).

41. Miklés Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker's State, trans. Michael Wright (New York: University Books, 1978). The printing technology of samizdat publications was an important indicator of the stage of the opposition’s development. Haraszti was able to prove, for example, that he wrote this book on a manual typewriter rather than an electric, which was a point in his favor. Even a manual typewriter, of course, was an improvement over handwritten texts. In 1980 Gabor Demszky introduced mimeograph, and by 1983 he was printing by offset (Haraszti, interview, February 2, 1992). 42. Maria Kovacs, an organizer of these lectures, interview, February 28, 1992. Also Sandor Szilagy, interview, May 17, 1991. 43. Interview, March 2, 1992. 44. Some say the boutique was open every Tuesday evening; others say every Wednesday evening. 45. Beszélé (Speaker) was a clever title. The word also means the visiting period in prison, that relatively brief moment coming at infrequent intervals when one could speak only with guarded openness. Among the founders were Gabor Ivanyi, Janos Kis, Ferenc Koszeg, Miklés Haraszti, Balint Nagy, Gyorgy Petri, and Sandor Szilagy. Laszl6 Rajk was important in distributing the journal, for which elaborate conspiratorial plans were laid. Gyorgy Bence, Kis’s close friend and collaborator, broke with him over the founding of Beszélé. Bence favored a broader effort to create an independent society rather than a high-powered journal for intellectuals. 46. Fora review of the contents of the 27 issues of Beszél6 see Andras Bozoki, “Preparing for the Revolutions: The Dissident Intellectuals Before 1989,” APSA 2009 Toronto Meeting Paper. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1450295 47. Andras Bozoki and Gergely Karaczony, “The Making of a Political Elite: Participants in the Hungarian Roundtable Talks of 1989,” in The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy, ed. Andras Bozoki (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), 84-85. 48. For an authoritative discussion of the two wings of the opposition, as well as of party reformers, see T6kés’s excellent study, Hungary's Negotiated Revolution, 167-209. 49. Janos M. Rainer, “Regime Change and the Tradition of 1956,” in Roundtable Talks of 1989, ed. Andras Bozoki, 211. 50. For a brief biography of Pozsgay (as well as of conservative Janos Berecz and future prime minister Karoly Grosz) see Tékés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution, 210-249. 51. Jézsef Bayer, “About Pluralism,” an interview in Mozgé Vildg, JPRS-EER 86-067, April 30, 1986, 54. 52. Two oppositionists, Tamas Bauer and Janos Toth, were nominated, and two, Gaspar Miklés Tamas and Laszl6 Rajk, were kept from nomination by pressure tactics. See

CHAPTER 3 e The Momentum of Change in Hungary 121 Toma, Socialist Authority, 48-55; and Barnabas Racz, “Political Participation and Developed Socialism: The Hungarian Elections of 1985,” Soviet Studies 39 (1987): 40-62. 53. Barnabas Racz, “Political Participation and the Expanding Role of the Hungarian Legislature,” East European Quarterly 22 (1989): 459-493. In this detailed examination of the first two years of the new legislature, Racz accurately predicted that by 1989-1990 a “different legislature will have emerged” (482). 54 Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: Janos Kadar, Communism and Hungary (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 211-212, 231.

55 The report was a greatly revised version of a secret party document originally written in 1981 that was so controversial at the time that all copies had been put under lock and key (Jason McDonald, “Transition to Utopia: A Reinterpretation of Economics, Ideas, and Politics in Hungary, 1984-1990,” East European Politics and Societies 7, no. 2 [Spring 1993]: 225).

56. Laszl6 Antal, Lajos Bokros, Istvan Csillag, Laszlé Lengyel, Gyorgy Matolcsy, and Andras Boros-Kazai, “Turning Point and Reform,” Eastern European Economics 26, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 5-44. 57. For a shortened version, see Janos Kis, Ferenc K6szeg, and Ottilia Solt, “A New Social Contract,” in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 244. 58. For a superb discussion of the process that led from this point to Kadar’s resignation one year later, see George Schépflin, Rudolf Tokés, and Ivan Vélgyes, “Leadership Change and Crisis in Hungary,” Problems of Communism 37 (September-October 1988): 23-46, on which my account relies heavily. 59. For a summary version, see East European Reporter 3, no. 2 (March 1988): 49-51. 60. Keesing’s, 35,593. 61. Pozsgay later said “We committed ourselves [at Lakitelek] to a multi-party system and an anti-catastrophe [economic] policy” (FBIS-EEU-90-191, October 2, 1990, 19). 62. Janos Kis, “The End and the Beginning,” in his Politics in Hungary: For a Democratic Alternative, trans. Gabor J. Follinus (Highland Lakes: Social Sciences Monographs and Atlantic Research and Publications, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1989), 9.

63. Foran excellent discussion of the formation and early history of the Hungarian opposition and the parties that resulted from it, see Bernard Ivan Tamas, From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary, 1989-1994 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2007). 64. The partisan article by K. Falusne-Szikra, “Jaws in the Danube: Water Management, Regime Change and the Movement against the Middle Danube Hydroelectric Dam,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17 (1993): 429-443, provides a few technical details. 65. Miklos Haraszti, “The Beginnings of Civil Society: The Independent Peace Movement and the Danube Movement in Hungary,” in In Search of Civil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (New York: Routledge, 1990), 71-87. 66. Keesing’s, 34,112. 67. The dam was definitively cancelled in 1992.

68. Tamas Hofer, “The March 15, 1989, Demonstration in Budapest: A Struggle for Public Memory,” typescript. I would like to thank Professor Hofer for his help both in Washington and in Budapest.

122 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

69. Kadar was also the one who in 1951 went to the cell of Laszl6 Rajk and convinced him to perform one last service for the party by confessing to his nonexistent crimes. A tape recording was made of that conversation, a transcript of which was published in 1991. Kadar continued to deny his involvement in Rajk’s judicial murder until his death (Istvan Rév, “The Necronym,” Representations 64 [Autumn, 1998]: 105n75). 70. Interview in New York Times, July 10, 1988, 1. 71. Newsweek [European edition], July 18, 1988, quoted by Schépflin et al., “Leadership Change and Crisis in Hungary,” 42. 72. Fora useful list of independent movements in Eastern Europe as of mid1989, see Jiri Pehe, “An Annotated Survey of Independent Movements in Eastern Europe,” RFE/ RAD Background Report/100, June 13, 1989. Gabor Demszky also gives brief sketches of most of these organizations in “Initiatives for Hungary,” East European Reporter 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 49-51, originally published in Hirmondo. Toékés says there were 21 new or recently founded political associations in Hungary by the end of 1988 (Hungary's Negotiated Revolution, 308). 73. Andras Racz, quoted by Gabor Demszky, “Initiatives for Hungary,” 51.

74. Istvan Szent-Ivanyi, an activist throughout the 1980s, says that while Gorbachev's policies had no direct impact on the democratic opposition, the realization that his policies might be consistent with reform in Hungary imperceptibly emerged in the minds of the oppositionists (interview, February 28, 1992). 75. See Hedrick Smith’ s discussion of Aganbegyan, New York Times, April 10, 1988, section 6, p. 36. 76. “East-West Relations and Eastern Europe (An American-Soviet Dialogue)-The Soviet Perspective,’ Problems of Communism 37 (May-August 1988): 60, 62. 77. Keesing’s, 36,114. 78. The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 40, no. 49 (January 4, 1989): 3. 79. Personal communication from Laszl6 Bruszt. Bruszt and David Stark who conducted

more than sixty interviews with former leaders of Hungary, including Pozsgay. Bruszt says that in general the more conservative the party leader, the sooner he realized the Soviets were not coming to their aid. The hardliners grasped this in October 1988 when conservative Yegor Ligachev fell in the Soviet Union. 80. Keesing’s, 36,468. 81. Tamas Hofer, “Dramaturgy of the Oppositional Demonstration,” talk at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, February 13, 1991, provides much of the data for this account. 82. Hofer takes the idea of the cultural tool kit from Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 57 (1986): 273-286. 83. Istvan Rév, “Parallel Autopsies,” Representations 49 (Winter, 1995): 15-39; Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 29-31, 136n19. 84. Keesing’s, 36,746.

CHAPTER 4

a,

Solidarity The Return of the Repressed in Poland

T he changes underway in Hungary in 1989 should have attracted interna-

tional attention. The party had promised to give up its monopoly role, a multiparty system was in the offing, marketizing economists were in the ascendancy, and, best of all, the Soviet Union had made it clear that it would not intervene. But in the spring of 1989 the world was not looking primarily at Hungary. Instead its gaze was focused on the remarkable political events in the Soviet Union. Even the withdrawal of the last troops from Afghanistan in February after almost ten years of futile bloodshed, an otherwise notable event, was eclipsed by the open election to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March and the raucous meeting of that body and of the Supreme Soviet two months later. The spectacle of relatively open elections and truly contentious debate in the motherland of Leninism overshadowed the less dramatic internal evolution in Hungary, which even acute observers did not grant a high likelihood of success in any event.! The stirring reemergence of Solidarity in 1988 and 1989 also overshadowed the relatively undramatic Hungarian events. In June 1989 Polish United Workers party lost every seat it contested in an election for the national legislature and

even many that were not contested. Two months later Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist prime minister in Eastern Europe since Petru Groza left office in Romania in 1952. Unlike Groza, however, Mazowiecki was no puppet. He represented the broadest genuine coalition of social forces ever brought together in Poland. To those who had not been following events, the change seemed almost instantaneous, but the coming to power of Solidarity in 1989 was the climax of a Polish trialogue that had been going on for more than a decade. The three participants in this trialogue were the party and the state, which had the strongest hand on paper, conducted a well-conceived and cleverly executed policy, and won a good many of the individual contests; the church, which followed a conciliatory and practical approach at the top that brought it many benefits and an oppositional approach in many local parishes that assisted

123

124 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

in the creation of an independent society; and Solidarity, which was overpowered on occasion, confused on others, and split internally, but, to the amazement of even itself, emerged in 1989 as the winner.

JARUZELSKI’S DUAL STRATEGY OF NORMALIZATION Despite the brutality of the first days and weeks of the imposition of martial law in December 1981, when most of the Solidarity leadership was arrested, enter-

prises militarized, miners killed, telephone communications interrupted, and strikes broken by specially trained forces, Jaruzelski’s overall strategy of normalization differed fundamentally from that of Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia after 1968. Jaruzelski did not attempt to restore a neo-Stalinist regime in Poland, not even to restore Gierek’s regime. In a curious way he realized the importance of Solidarity’s contributions to Polish public life, confirmed the necessity of the social accords of 1980, and in due time even accepted the idea of pluralism. Jaruzelski initially maintained that because of its “juvenile emotional dynamism” Solidarity had become an unreliable candidate for partnership with the party and had pushed the economy to the wall with unreasonable wage demands. It had to be suppressed because it had “trodden on the law, ruined the economy, waged a struggle against the party and the Government, and also insulted the Sejm.’2 But in time, beginning perhaps when the police took Lech Walesa to Warsaw and were unable to get him to appeal to the people for calm, Jaruzelski came to understand that it was Solidarity, not the party, that enjoyed the sup-

port of the nation. During the first few weeks of martial law the general presented himself as minister of defense, prime minister, and chairman of the new Military Council for National Salvation but never as head of the party.3 “When the party began to reappear publicly in 1982,” David Ost argues, “there was never any question that it could run things by itself. That notion had been discredited forever.’ To compensate for this lack Jaruzelski and his advisors complemented

their repression of Solidarity, which they pursued vigorously for years, with a sophisticated strategy of attracting support through superficially reasonable offers of cooperation and of creating new organizations that simulated independent institutions. One of the first steps in this dual policy was to regain control of the intelligent-

sia. Immediately after the introduction of martial law all media and educational institutions had to undergo “verification,” a process in which each employee was interviewed concerning his or her attitude toward the regime and toward Solidarity. Over two thousand persons in the media lost their jobs for failing this test, and those who stayed had to sign a loyalty oath by which they also resigned from Solidarity.5 Not everyone was fired or intimidated. Many prominent television actors, for example, refused to appear in popular soap operas, which led to the shows’ cancellation. But eventually, by disbanding the artists’ union, the writers union, the film board, and the association of journalists, the government restored its control over the means of public discussion.°

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 125

Having broken the media, Jaruzelski then proceeded gradually, over a period of years, to open it to varied content. Local or small-circular journals received the most freedom at first and national television the least, but over the next few years independent intellectuals could, if they did not associate themselves too openly with Solidarity positions, publish increasingly outspoken pieces. In this way, a number of intellectuals were able to play a role in making Poland a variegated society without actually entering into illegal activities. Jaruzelski also sought an accommodation with the Catholic church, which in 1981 received a new primate, Archbishop Jézef Glemp.’ Over time, the regime had considerable success in dealing with Glemp. On the Sunday following the imposition of martial law, for example, he gave a sermon advising caution, much to the dismay of many activists. But during the first months of martial law the church, while always expressing its concern for peace and nonviolence, came down on the side of a more pluralist society. On April 4, 1982, the primate’s social council adopted a report pointing out that any social contract was impossible without popular support and that therefore the state must recognize society as an active subject, which meant holding truly free elections. In August Glemp himself, speaking before a crowd of 250,000 people, called for the release of all those still in captivity, specifically Lech Walesa, as well as for the resumption of trade union activity, i-e., the return of Solidarity. In September the episcopate circulated a sermon to be read throughout the country that called for an end to martial law, amnesty for the imprisoned, and renewal of dialogue. Individual priests often supported opposition activity directly, and the church’s pastoral activities, which included creating special ministries for workers and for farmers as well as patronizing artists and supporting youth movements, gave life to the idea of an independent society during the worst years of martial law.®

UNDERGROUND SOLIDARITY Initially, the regime did not contemplate completely abolishing Solidarity, which was only “suspended.” Jaruzelski hoped that the determined use of force would demonstrate the futility of rejecting the party's leading role and encourage an accommodation on the party’s terms. By isolating Solidarity’s leadership, Deputy Prime Minister Mieczystaw Rakowski said, “people who think realistically and,

most important, [who] are committed to socialism would come to prevail.” This was not an unreasonable hope, since historically Communist regimes had been quite successful in taming social organizations like unions and had never had difficulty finding ambitions people willing to serve them. But, like every other Communist regime in Eastern Europe, the Polish leadership had no idea of the depth of its own illegitimacy in the eyes of the public, even though this should have been obvious after the Solidarity experience. It took seven years for them to realize that it was not inexplicable fanaticism that caused hundreds of activists to reject repeated offers of emigration visas and thousands of others to write, print, and distribute oppositional newspapers and journals. A deep sense

126 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

of humiliation and injustice permeated society and sustained the oppositionists’ principled behavior. The tone of Solidarity’s resistance was set almost immediately in the first months of martial law. Despite the regime’s best efforts to decapitate the union, a handful of activists eluded capture and took the union’s struggle underground. The new Solidarity leaders became so not by election or by choice but by virtue of accidentally escaping the December roundup. It was fortunate, therefore, that the senior figure remaining at large in the Mazowsze region, the one that contains Warsaw and is therefore the most important in Poland, was twenty-eight-year old Zbigniew Bujak. The thirteenth son of a peasant family, Bujak had become technician at the Ursus tractor works, where his instinctive understanding of politics had brought him to high position despite his youth. Bujak considered Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” the theoretical underpinning for his activity. Later he said that he saw in the victories of Solidarity and Charter 77 “an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay. 10 In Bujak’s view, underground Solidarity’s hope lay in continuing the tradition of KOR and of the self-limiting revolution by constructing an independent society outside the parameters of ordinary politics. Many disagreed. Jacek Kuron, for example, wrote from prison that the imposition of martial law called for more confrontational resistance:!! A well-organized, mass resistance movement is the Poles’ only chance....For this reason—in contrast to our strategy before August 1980—we must now organize around a central nucleus and accept its discipline.... Throughout the many years of my opposition activity I have always argued against the use of force. Therefore I now feel duty-bound to state publicly that in the present circumstances preparation to overthrow the occupation by a concerted, collective action would be the least of all possible evils.

Bujak and one of his colleagues, teacher Wiktor Kulerski, rejected Kuron’s view that a centralized organization was needed to combat terror.!2 “Local groups and social circles in the community should organize...to build a system of social structures independent of the state,” wrote Bujak. These actions should include

the creation of mutual aid committees, independent publications, and educational and cultural networks. We do not need to choose between revolution or compromise, Kulerski added. Instead of organizing ourselves as an underground state, we should be organizing ourselves as an underground society. Not into a movement directed by a central headquarters requiring absolute discipline, but into a loosely structured, decentralized movement composed of mutually independent group committees, etc., each of which would be largely autonomous and directed....Such a movement should strive for a situation in which the government will control empty shops but not the market, employment but not the means to livelihood, the state press but not the flow of information, printing houses but not the publishing movement, telephones and the postal service but not communication, schools but not education.

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 127

“This road is not one of rapid and stunning success,” Bujak said. But “structures rich in form last the longest.... A democratic society, with abundant forms of social life and activity, can defend itself against various defeats, while a totalitarian society is very frail, and every setback threatens its viability.”

Bujak’s and Kulerski’s views represented the dominant position that Aleksander Smolar has called the “legitimist” opposition, that is, opposition “perceived by its adherents as the continuation of legal Solidarity.”“* When leaders of this persuasion still at large in four regions of Poland met clandestinely in April

1982, they did not create a central party organization but rather a Temporary Coordinating Commission (Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna—TKK) to coordinate the activities of those independent local unions that were still trying to maintain their identity underground. TKK entitled its first programmatic statement “The Underground Society,’ a play on the term independent society. The program called for a boycott of official organizations and for alternative observances of significant anniversaries, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of independent culture.

The debate between Kuron and Bujak, between what Michnik called the “instant change” and the “long march” points of view, took place in Solidarity’s underground newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze (Warsaw Region Weekly).!5 This paper was founded and run by a remarkable group of women editors and correspondents led by Helena Luczywo, who began her underground newspaper activities as one of the organizers of Rabotnik.'s When most of the male Solidarity leaders were suddenly interned in December, Luczywo and six other Warsaw women immediately founded what they ironically called the Ladies Operational Unit (Damska Grupa Operacyjna—DMO). In less than two months they accomplished two important things: first, one of the group, Ewa Kulik, searched out Bujak and set up a system of hiding him that proved very successful, and second, they started Tygodnik Mazowsze. From its first issue on February 11, 1982, until it was transformed into Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989, a female editorial board administered a cadre of hundreds of co-workers and thousands of volunteers. The team’s idea was that men like Bujak would remain the public face of underground Solidarity to retain the respect of Poland’s patriarchal society, but the women would hide them and put out the paper. This proved so successful that they were able to publish 290 issues of the weekly and reach a circulation that

hit a high of 80,000 copies. One reason they remained undetected was that it occurred to no one in Poland that women could conduct such a sophisticated underground operation. The team took full advantage of this cultural blindness, often using old or stylishly dressed women to distribute the paper, or hiding clandestine materials in piles of diapers, which no self respecting Polish policeman would search. Tygodnik Mazowsze was the main voice of underground Solidarity, but it was far from the only clandestine paper appearing in the 1980s, although apparently it was the only one completely run by women.” Many of these publications were not even Solidarity papers. In Wroctaw, for example, Kornel Morawiecki, who

128 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

believed the relatively accommodating position of the legitimists did not represent the true interests of the working class, founded Fighting Solidarity (Solidarnos¢ Walczaca). Morawiecki was against any dialogue with the regime and went so far as to suggest that activists sabotage Soviet bases and communications, conduct propaganda among the army, and obstruct the armaments industry on the model of the Polish Home Army during World War II. This would prove to the Soviet

Union, he thought, that its “direct rule” over Poland was not functioning and should be replaced by “weaker Finlandization.”'8 On the other side of the fence, the Circles of Social Resistance (Komitety Oporu Spotecznego—KOS) rejected even the idea of writing a political program, which its adherents maintained would only put them in the same ethical category as the ruling party. “We are not fighting for a better tomorrow, KOS leaders said, “but for a better today....A free Poland is not a point in time or space from which we are separated by a wall of external force. It is a possibility asleep here and now inside each one of us.”!9 KOS, which published a successful antipolitical newspaper throughout the 1980s, later became the founder of Poland’s antiwar and pacifist movements.

Other groups argued that to be a self-governing republic did not have to mean creating an egalitarian workers’ self-management or a trilateral corporate settlement among Solidarity, the church, and the party. Independence from foreign pressure and the recognition of real Polish sovereignty in a Catholic context were the goals of these activists. Aleksander Hall, an organizer of the nationalist Young Poland movement who joined Solidarity only after the imposition of martial law and then left it again early in 1984, presented this “unrealistic” argument with great skill in Polityka Polska (Polish Politics). Niepodlegtosé (Independence) took a more moderate position, stressing independence and traditional Polish values. The group around the journal Gtos (Voice) was explicitly Catholic in orientation and Wiadomosci (News) argued that the church should have its own agenda. It called criticism of Glemp “irresponsible” and “baseless” since the church was following a consistent policy of peace. More radical proposals came from Wyzwolenie (Liberation), which considered Poland to be under occupation, and Stowo Podziemne (Underground Word), which advocated “developed liberalism,” including a multiparty system, depoliticization of the church, and the partition of the Soviet Union into a number of independent states.2° In short, under martial law a vigorous pluralist press came to life in Poland. Widespread grassroots support for the opposition contrasted markedly with the relative lack of response generated by Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. Within a year of the imposition of martial law in Poland hundreds of small groups, a few of them slipshod and ineffective, a few stalking horses organized by the police, and still others ingenious in starting a newspaper or handing out broadsides, emerged all over the country. Graffiti appeared; speakers organized discussions during intermissions at plays; clandestine lecture courses began again; students flashed the forbidden “V” sign in public places; volunteers collected Solidarity dues in factories; unofficial art exhibits took place. In Swidnik almost everyone in town took to leaving their houses for a walk at the time the evening news was

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 129

broadcast, which so irritated the authorities that they declared a curfew when the news was on, whereupon the town began taking its stroll during an earlier newscast. In Warsaw first old women and then students began placing flowers in the form of a large cross in Victory Square to memorialize the late Cardinal Wyszynski. Each night the police would clear the square and wash away the flowers. And the next morning first one old woman and then another would appear with her carnations and the process would be repeated. By mid-1982 the authori-

ties had to close off the square to end the “battle of the crosses.” “Everywhere else,’ one university lecturer commented, “people think history is something that happens to strangers, while here it is what happens to...us and our friends.”2! At first, those Solidarity leaders still at liberty believed that a compromise between the state and civil society based on the Social Accords of 1980 could be worked out. But it did not take them long to realize the impossibility of an early agreement. Solidarity’s dilemma became how to pressure the government into accepting the union without becoming a political movement itself. The legitimists never solved this problem—it was insoluble—but in the beginning their favored tool remained, as in the days of legal activity, the general strike. This was a problematic strategy under conditions of legality, but underground, with all the difficulties of communication and contact that condition implied, it proved impossible. The Temporary Coordinating Commission (TKK) began to lose track of the public mood almost immediately. On May Day 1982, for example, it called for citizens to boycott official celebrations and to go to church. Instead, in Warsaw some fifty thousand protesters marched in spontaneous counterdemonstrations against the official ceremonies. Two days later, on the anniversary of the Polish constitution of 1791, ten thousand more people assembled. Similar demonstra-

tions throughout Poland led to the arrest of approximately three thousand persons. The demonstrations took TKK by surprise, but it decided to try to take advantage of the continued willingness of citizens to put themselves on the line by offering the government a deal: lift martial law and drop the suspension of the union and TKK would appeal for an end to strike activity. When the government rejected this rather naive offer and added that it would never negotiate with Solidarity, Tygodnik Mazowsze called for demonstrations on the second anniversary of the union’s formation, August 31. But the protests failed. Authorities dispersed the smaller-than-expected crowds and arrested some four thousand persons. The government’s success in repressing these demonstrations, as well as its ability to handle dozens of smaller strikes, work stoppages, and other spontaneous actions, gave credence to Jaruzelski’s claim that he had won “the battle of the winter.’ In July 1982 Jaruzelski showed his growing confidence by beginning to release detainees and to loosen some of the martial law restrictions. Over time, a balanced combination of vigorous repression on the one hand, including militarizing factories and mines and firing strike leaders, and the staged release and pardon of detainees on the other hand, succeeded in suggesting to the population that stability was returning and Solidarity was losing.

130 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

And yet by the middle of the summer of 1982 Jaruzelski and his team realized that their original idea of isolating the leadership of the union to attract the “realistic” element had failed. The union, far from accepting defeat, had only become more determined than ever to maintain its independence underground. Therefore, on October 8, 1982, the government disestablished Solidarity and introduced new rules by which independent unions could be formed. Having failed to get Solidarity to accept the party's leading role, the regime decided to establish “self-governing” unions that would. These unions retained the right to strike, although not for political reasons, and they were forbidden to create national organizations for two years. In their first year they managed to enroll about 2.5 million workers. The spontaneous reaction of the Gdansk shipyard to the new union law was to go out on strike, but the underground leadership proved unable to respond effectively. By October 12 the strike was broken and the shipyard militarized. Now, closing the barn door after the horse had been stolen, TKK called a one-day national protest strike for November 10 with a general strike threatened for 1983. The one-day protest strike fizzled, undermined in part by Jaruzelski and Glemp’s bland announcement two days earlier that the Pope would be visiting Poland in 1983. On November 12, Jaruzelski trumped the reeling union by releasing his most famous detainee, Lech Watesa.2

PERMISSIBLE PLURALISM One year after the declaration of martial law Solidarity was profoundly disoriented. The old Solidarity, the democratic union of ten million members, was clearly finished. It began to dawn on the opposition that a daunting amount of slow and difficult work would be required to create an independent, pluralist society that could present itself for full partnership with the state. Sensing he had the opposition on the run, Jaruzelski pushed ahead with his balanced strategy of repression and artfully timed concessions. A typically two-sided act was the announcement in July 1983 that because conditions had stabilized he was lifting martial law and releasing a number of detainees. At the same time he changed the constitution to permit the head of state to declare a state of emergency without consulting the Sejm or any other body, adjusted a number of laws to permit a continuation of strict police control, and kept a few of the main leaders of Solidarity in detention.” Government representatives continued to denigrate Solidarity as nonexistent, lacking reasonable advisors, corrupt, illegal, and antisocialist. They pressed forward with trials of the most prominent activists and tried to subvert the leadership with offers of emigration and petty harassment. Lech Walesa, although no longer in prison, bore the brunt of these negative tactics. He was prevented from returning to work, investigated for alleged tax irregularities, detained for short periods, and barred from speaking at rallies. His flat was searched, his assistants had their driving licenses revoked, and he was constantly attacked in the press

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 131

for his hostile and uncooperative attitude, dismissed as “totally discredited” and without any further role in Polish politics, and ridiculed for his contacts abroad as “the self-appointed American ambassador to Poland.” And yet, in the midst of all of this hostility, Jaruzelski tacitly adopted perhaps the most fundamental principle underlying Solidarity’s program. The party continued to insist, as it would until 1989 and as it had to as a Leninist organization, that it remain the leading political actor in society. But it no longer maintained that it be the only actor in society, a crucial difference that set it on the slippery road to extinction. While suppressing Solidarity with his right hand, so to speak, Jaruzelski struggled with his left hand to devise a kind of pluralism the party could control. The first of these “organs of permissible pluralism,” as George Kolankiewicz calls them, were the new “self-governing” unions. Late in 1982, Jaruzelski created a second such organ, the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth (Patriotyczny Ruch Ocalenia Narodowego-PRON). A revised version of the old Front of National Unity, PRON was supposed to reflect a “pluralism of views and the differentiation of interests” while seeking a coalition with various forces in society, not including Solidarity, of course.24 With the constitutional amendments of July 1983 this completely artificial entity became the official organization “for uniting the patriotic forces of the nation...and for the cooperation of political parties, organizations, social associations and citizens.” Neither Walesa nor the rest of the opposition submitted to Jaruzelski’ s stick or succumbed to his carrot, and, more remarkable given the provocations, the legitimists did not abandon the moderate position first laid out by Bujak and Kulerski in 1982. “The aim of our struggle remains the same,’ TKK’s statement of January 1983 said: “A SELF-GOVERNING REPUBLIC.”2s The methods that would lead toward that end, the statement continued, remained the refusal to participate in lies, the cultivation of independent thought, and preparation for a general strike. “Pluralism and openness are the mark of the Solidarity movement,’ the program reiterated. Despite this bravado, the democratic opposition felt in 1983 that things were going badly. In reading over some of the analyses of that year and the next, one is struck by how often a mood of despair flows over the activists. They are tired; the people are going back to their regular concerns and are becoming apathetic; the government has just won another battle; the interior polemics are becoming debilitating; the future is far away. But the difference between 1972, when Leszek Kolakowski had asked how one hopes in a hopeless situation, and 1983, when it was possible to read and write and scheme, was palpable. And in 1983 Solidarity had one asset that it did not have in 1972: Lech Walesa. In the letter he wrote to General Jaruzelski when he left prison, Walesa signed himself as “Corporal Lech Walesa,” but everywhere else he presented himself as the elected head of independent Polish society. The government's characterization of him as a man who had lost all influence was wildly incorrect. Watesa constituted a separate opposition movement all by himself. Always ready to talk with the government and believing that negotiations in which compromises would

132 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

have to be made were in the end inevitable, he had an uncanny knack for presenting himself as society's most uncompromising oppositionist. In April 1983 he caused a sensation when, despite almost constant surveillance, he contrived to arrange a secret three-day meeting with TKK. In November, he did it again. The embarrassed government put out the patently absurd explanation that since Solidarity no longer existed and Lech Watesa was a private citizen, the meeting could only be considered a social occasion, a position Walesa confirmed with a wink.?7 In October 1983 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, which the government found a bit more difficult to explain away as a social occasion. At a time of declining optimism in the opposition, the Nobel Prize was an enormous psychological lift. “Our wings have caught the wind,” is the way Walesa put it.28 In the long run, of course, Walesa was right, but in the mid-1980s it might have been more accurate to say that the wind had gone out of Solidarity’s sails. During 1983 and 1984, actors drifted back to work, PRON’s public role expanded, and the government achieved increasing legitimacy by broadening the limits to

public discussion. In November 1984 unions created under the October 1982 law formed the National Trade Union Accord (Ogdlnopolskie Porozumiene Zwiazkéw Zawodowych—OPZZ) and elected Alfred Miodowicz its chairman. OPZZ, Miodowicz said, “will not have anything to do with restoring the old organizational structures of the trade union movement, nor returning to old mistakes.”29 Consumer goods such as soap and sugar reappeared in shops, and ordinary social life returned to normal.3° Average citizens no longer felt the same obligation to be unhappy that they did in 1982. Jaruzelski, Rakowski, and others began to appropriate the symbolism of Solidarity, giving speeches at places sanctified by the Solidarity movement and prohibiting Solidarity activists from doing so. Under the slogan “Social Accords: Part of Our History,” they argued that martial law had been the only way to save the agreements of 1980, which the regime claimed it had now incorporated into the Polish experience by means of the new unions.3!

Victories in the local elections of 1984 and the national elections of 1985 also gave the regime confidence. These elections were conducted under new rules

similar to those the Hungarians used in 1985, with PRON acting as the organizer and lightning rod, but the choices offered were more restricted than in the Hungarian case and the results more foreordained. Still, the elections were not entirely without drama. There was a contest, but it was over how many turned out to vote rather than who got elected. The government laid down the gauntlet in 1984 by saying that if 70 percent of the electorate voted it would consider the election a success. Taking up the challenge, Solidarity called for a boycott.32 After the elections both sides claimed they won, but Solidarity’s claims were the less

convincing. In the local elections of 1984 the government reported that about 75 percent of the population voted, and in the national election of 1985, in which it set a goal of raising that percentage, it announced that 79 percent had voted. Solidarity, which with difficulty conducted its own surveys in selected voting areas, claimed that the actual numbers were only about 60 percent in both cases.

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 133

Even if Solidarity’s figures were correct, they did not show the kind of massive rejection of the regime that free elections were to show later. But government spokesman Jerzy Urban could argue with some plausibility that the 1984 election was “evidence of the social support for stabilization, social calm, and our country’s development along the socialist road” and that the 1985 vote represented “a vast acceptance by the majority of the permanence of the system and the government’s political line.”33 We can suspect that the government’s analysis of the 1985 election was faulty, but at the time Urban’s view—that it ended a period of crisis—found wide accep-

tance. At the very least it gave Jaruzelski enough confidence to take another step along his road of normalization. During the Sejm that met in November 1985 he resigned as prime minister, a position he had held since 1981, but retained the office of chairman of the Council of State (president) and turned the cabinet over to Zbigniew Messner, an economist who formed a government consisting primarily of technicians rather than party stalwarts.

THE MURDER OF FATHER JERZY POPIELUSZKO As Jaruzelski continued to move Poland toward a superficial stability, the Catholic church remained a thorn in his side, especially in the person of Pope John Paul II. The pontiff’s June 1983 visit once again drew large and enthusiastic crowds.34 Without mentioning the banned labor union by name, John Paul II made many pointed references to his personal “solidarity” with the church and with his homeland while suggesting that “the events that followed August 1980” had a moral character and that trade unions were “an indispensable component of social life.”35 “Social justice consists of respect for and implementation of human rights for all members of society,” he said.3¢ Surprisingly, all three sides expressed satisfaction with the visit: the government considered it proof that the

outside world was beginning to accept normalization as a respectable process; the church was pleased with a visit of its spiritual leader; and Solidarity found the pontiffs positive references to its goals gratifying. In April 1985, John Paul also appointed a strong Solidarity supporter as bishop of Wroclaw, which was one of the main centers of opposition activism.

Cardinal Glemp’s position, on the other hand, was more ambiguous, although in general he was obligated to follow the Vatican’s pro-opposition line. Glemp saw himself as a pragmatist seeking to improve the position of the church

in Poland through pastoral work rather than through the sort of romantic and insurrectionary resistance that had led Poland to disaster in past centuries. His personal politics were those of Endecja, the conservative National Democratic party of the interwar period, and accordingly he was suspicious of the leftist origins of Solidarity.37 His style was to maneuver behind the scenes to gain advantage for the church by lobbying for a new law regulating church-state relations, by creating an agricultural fund that the church would administer, or by reestablishing diplomatic relations between Poland and the Vatican. Although he failed

1334 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

to achieve all his objectives in these campaigns, on balance he was not unsuccessful. Jaruzelski granted the church wide access to television at Easter and provided

substantial funds for building new churches. By 1984 nine hundred churches were under construction with regime financing.?8 But these concessions had their price. Glemp disciplined priests the government complained about, and he even ordered the wording of at least one hymn changed (people sang the old version anyway).3?

In some local parishes the picture was completely different. Mieczystaw Nowak, for example, became so well known for his forthright sermons to workers in Ursus that Glemp transferred him. Henryk Jankowski, Walesa’s confessor, was famous for his flamboyance.*° The most charismatic parish priest was Father Jerzy Popietuszko, who since January 1982 had been celebrating a monthly “Mass for the Fatherland” in Warsaw's St. Stanislaw Kostka church. As many as ten thousand of the faithful would gather on these occasions to hear Popieluszko

talk about the “tears, injuries, and blood of workers” and to suggest that “the hopes of 1980 are alive and are bearing fruit.”4! Needless to say, Popetuszko was not popular with the regime. He had been detained by the police, upbraided by Cardinal Glemp, and formally charged with abuse of religious freedom and with harboring concealed arms. On October 20, 1984, Popieluszko disappeared.42 Two days later four low ranking policemen were secretly arrested; after a week Interior Minister General Czeslaw Kiszczak announced that an investigation was under way; and after ten

days the body was found. The whole country was shaken. The title of Bujak’s and Kulerski’s editorial in Tygodnik Mazowsze, “We Are All Guilty,” may have been rhetorical, but the deeper strands of the murder, if there were any, remain unclear. The most common belief, besides the obvious one that the state decided to kill Popietuszko, was that his murder was part of an antiregime plot by hardliners. The party contained a conservative faction, called the “Cements,” who would have been capable of it, but no real evidence has surfaced to sustain the argument. It seems likely, however, that neither Jaruzelski nor Kiszczak ordered the killing or knew of it ahead of time.*?

The most remarkable thing about the tragedy was that the government decided to put the four police men who abducted and killed Popietuszko on public trial. For over a month early in 1985 a fascinated and absorbed national television audience tuned in every night for excerpts from the trial, in which they learned juicy details of the private and highly privileged lives of the security

police. In the end the four officers went convicted and sentenced to terms in prison ranging from fifteen to twenty-five years (the sentences were subsequently substantially reduced).

The conviction of Popietuszko’s killers was an important moment in the development of the Polish trialogue. On the surface in 1985 it seemed that the party/state and Solidarity were completely at odds. The government consistently maintained that it would never negotiate with Solidarity, and even after granting a conditional amnesty in the middle of 1984 it found ways to rearrest many of

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 135

the most important activists and put them on trial. On their side, the oppositionists refused to accept the regime's legitimacy, and most leaders who remained underground did not respond to the 1984 offer of amnesty. But in a curious way the two sides were communicating, and, all appearances to the contrary, it was the government that was starting to move, not Solidarity. Jaruzelski’s decision to convict his own security police of Popieftuszko’s murder went beyond the earlier efforts to create organs of permissible pluralism. His admission that he could not simply ignore public opinion, as government spokesman Jerzy Urban had tried to do at first by ridiculing those who had expressed concern for Popietuszko’s safety, pushed him a bit further down the track toward real pluralism.*4 As in many things Jaruzelski did, however, the trial served a dual purpose. It was not only a method of gaining credibility with the public but also part of a strategy of gaining full control over the party by weakening its most conservative elements. In 1985 and into 1986 he removed many high-ranking officials who opposed his relatively moderate policies toward the intelligentsia and the opposition. In November he succeeded in replacing hard-line foreign minister Stefan Olszowski, and in January 1986 he recalled Stanistaw Kociolek, a Stalinist, from his position as ambassador to the Soviet Union.‘5 During the same period General Kiszczak quietly reassigned perhaps two hundred of the most recalcitrant security officers. With the hard-line faction tamed, the Tenth Party Congress, held in June 1986, looked for all the world like any one of the well-orchestrated and completely predictable congresses conducted at the height of the party’s powers. In fact, it was the beginning of a new, accelerated phase of change.

THE EXPANSION OF PERMISSIBLE PLURALISM For Jaruzelski consolidation did not mean exercising greater social control, as it had for Husak in Czechoslovakia, but enhancing his ability to open the party further to society. In August and September 1986 he finally granted a full and complete amnesty to all persons detained under martial law, even those who had stayed underground for long periods of time, such as Bujak, who had finally been arrested in May 1986, and Michnik, who had been under threat of trial for five years. This step put the ball in the opposition’s court, because full amnesty met the first condition Solidarity had set for negotiations. A significant number of activists, both inside and outside Solidarity, had long since decided that any cooperation with a Communist government was impossible, even immoral, and they quickly announced that they had no intention of coming out from underground. The legitimists, on the other hand, granting that it would be premature to abandon underground activities altogether, argued that it was important to meet the government's initiative at least halfway. Even Jacek Kuron agreed. “We must not waste this opportunity,” he said.4¢ Walesa was a master at finding ways to accommodate apparently contradic-

tory viewpoints. This time he decided on a dual strategy, partly public, partly underground. On September 11, 1986, ten days after the definitive announcement

136 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

of the amnesty, he created the Solidarity Provisional Council (Tymczasowa Rada Solidarnosci—TRS), which he chaired. Of the seven other members, at least five were fresh from prison.4” This did not make Solidarity a legal entity, but it did bring a portion of its activities out into the open. At the same time TKK continued its underground operations under anonymous leadership. Regional councils were given the option of staying underground with the TKK or of going public with the Provisional Council. This new situation of both open and clandestine possibilities, in which organizations of all kinds sprang up, upset many oppositionists. Steeped in a culture that assumed society's interests were one and should be represented by a single organization—not only did the Leninist party claim this but the name Solidarity implied it as well—many activists shrank from the uncontrolled pluralism of local initiatives. But the legitimist leadership stuck to its guns. If the government was going to moderate its hostility in practice, Walesa would revise Solidarity’s approach also, bringing some of its organs into public view, not overpowering local initiatives from the center, and moving always in a direction that kept in view the main chance—a power-sharing arrangement. Jaruzelski’s next step was to attempt a power-sharing arrangement of his own. In the fall of 1986, after consultations with the church, he proposed creating a Social Consultative Council attached to the Council of State. Consisting of fifty-six selected “representatives of Polish society,’ the council was to be a forum for “open and unrestrained” discussion of political, economic, and social issues that would advise and inform the president of society’s views. Very few independent intellectuals chose to participate in the council, evaluating it as what David Ost calls a “piddling concession.”48 But a handful of prominent persons did join, including the chairman of the Catholic Intellectual Clubs (who resigned from the clubs to do so) and Wtiadystaw Sita-Nowicki, a noted civil rights lawyer who had spent time in jail under both the Nazis and the Communists and had been a legal advisor to Solidarity. As the price of his participation, Sila-Nowicki extracted a promise that the proceedings of the council would be published. This proved to be an astute move that expanded the public space considerably. Once the council started meeting in 1987, Sila-Nowicki and some other members turned it into such a lively forum of debate that “no less an authority than Wroctaw Solidarity leader Wiadystaw Frasyniuk said that many Solidarity activists were avidly reading the Council’s reports, often more eagerly than they read the underground press! "49

Indeed, everyone was reading the press with increasing interest because, consistent with his turn toward a more open society, from about 1986 Jaruzelski significantly liberalized censorship. Concurrently with the takeoff of glasnost in the Soviet Union and the increasing openness of the Hungarian press, the Polish press began to undertake discussions of the theory of totalitarianism, to criticize the government's economic performance, to float radical marketizing and pluralizing reforms, to discuss sensitive historical subjects, and to publish previously forbidden authors such as Milan Kundera and George Orwell. In March 1987 the government even legalized the underground journal Res Publica, which

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 137

had originated as a samizdat publication in the 1970s. By late 1987 the executive director of Helsinki Watch observed that Poland was “the freest country in the Eastern Bloc.”5°

The change in Jaruzelski’s approach, or at least the intensification of that side of his policy that had sought since 1982 to preempt Solidarity’s support with the public, brought significant international gains, which was surely one of the important reasons Jaruzelski undertook the policy. When martial law descended, President Ronald Reagan had imposed economic sanctions on Poland, including lifting its most favored nation trade status. These made it difficult for Poland to negotiate with the international agencies that held its debt. Gradually, with each partial amnesty, the United States relaxed its pressure. In 1986 Reagan acquiesced to Poland’s admission to the International Monetary Fund, and early in 1987, after consulting with Solidarity activists, he restored Poland's most favored nation trade status. By September 1987 relations had improved to the extent that Vice-President George H. W. Bush visited Warsaw, where he talked not only with General Jaruzelski but also with Lech Watesa. During 1987 Poland's relations with the Soviet Union improved as well, as

the Polish party under Jaruzelski became, along with the Hungarian reformers, the most open collaborator with Gorbachev's reform plans among the East European leaders. At a meeting in Moscow in April, Jaruzelski and Gorbachev signed an agreement on cooperation that included a commitment to investigate the “blank spots” in Soviet-Polish history, such the decimation of the Polish Communist party by the Comintern in the late 1930s; the deportation of over one million Poles from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland in 1940-1941, one of whom had been Jaruzelski himself; and the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1940. In effect, Gorbachev's policy of glasnost was providing Jaruzelski with an opportunity to increase his popularity at home by assuming some anti-Russian postures, which during the course of 1987 he did. In 1987 the pope visited Poland for the third time in ten years. While the visit was not the violently emotional event that the visit of 1979 had been, John Paul continued to draw hundreds of thousands, millions even, to his sermons. By continually speaking of human rights, pluralism, and free association and by granting Lech Walesa a private audience, John Paul made it clear that he strongly favored an intensified course of reform. Even if Cardinal Glemp pursued a cautious policy and even if some bishops attempted to ban Solidarity banners from the crowds attending the pope, the visit added to the heightened sense of potentialities that characterized Poland in 1987.5! So did the emergence at the regional and local level of an entirely new kind of public activity, what Padraic Kenney calls “socialist surrealism.”52 One of the moving forces beyond this new kind of public theater was Wolnos¢ i Pokodj (Freedom and Peace), a small but very active group of young people formed in 1985 to support the right of young men not to take the oath of military service. WiP, as it was known (pronounced “Veep”), conducted sit ins, protest fasts, happenings, and seminars that were clearly national and Catholic in orientation, but on the

138 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

other hand were nonconfrontational. Rather than protesting against the regime, Wi?P essentially ignored it, while at the same time finding ways to maximize its media coverage. Its members were not so interested in truth telling, as were models they admired such as Vaclav Havel. They sought concrete results to everyday problems, but with a relatively light touch. Much more attuned to the possibility of the theatrical, even the absurd, was the Orange Alternative in Wroclaw. Its leader, Waldemar Fydrych, chose the color orange as intermediate between communist red and papal yellow. He was more interested making the police look ridiculous than in political activism. For example, on Children’s Day in 1987 the Orange Alternative invited citizens to a rally in which they were asked to put on red caps and become elves (krasnoludek, or “little red person”), whereupon he and his friends passed out candy, sang children’s songs, and danced, even as they were being carted off by the police. Communal parties like this were difficult for the regime to take seriously, although they reacted, but this was part of the point. Kenney calls the period from the Chernobyl disaster to the end of 1989 the “carnival years” because the increasingly amusing and distracting actions of groups such as the Orange Alternative used humor and street theater to poke fun at the solemnity of politics. To many of the young participants both the party and Solidarity alike seemed all too serious and out of date.

Nevertheless, even in this new atmosphere the government seemed to retain the initiative. In Hungary the democratic opposition found three issues around which they successfully rallied support, but these were not available in Poland. Without significant Polish enclaves in bordering countries, Solidarity could not draw on the issue of persecuted Poles abroad, although there was some grumbling about German attitudes toward Poles. Environmental issues were an important part of the underground press in Poland, and local activists had some success in thwarting the government’s plan for nuclear power plants and storage facilities for radioactive waste, but activists lacked a powerful single issue like the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam on which to focus attention. And whereas street performers did amuse or shock the public, and the more organized opposition did mount demonstrations on holidays like May 3 (the date of the Polish constitution of 1791), these demonstrations never developed the momentum of the March 15 movement in Hungary or the significance of the anniversary of Imre Nagy’s execution.

ECONOMIC FAILURES AND A BREAK IN THE LOGJAM For all the apparent progress of permissive pluralism and the seeming softness of Solidarity’s support, Jaruzelski’s stabilization of Poland was an illusion. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the economic sphere. By 1986 lines for the purchase of ordinary goods were becoming common once again, and Adam

Michnik characterized 1988 as a time when “everybody's fondest dream was to be able to locate a roll of toilet paper.’>3 Jaruzelski had inherited a seriously sick economy. At the beginning of martial law official figures for 1981 showed

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 139

overall production down by 12 percent from the previous year, which itself had not been that good, and foreign trade was $2 billion in deficit. A career military officer, Jaruzelski had little idea how to deal with this “picture of colossal chaos,” as the party newspaper Trybuna Ludu called it in January 1982.54 His first efforts were drastic and martial. Noting that the export of coal, Poland’s primary source of foreign currency, had fallen precipitously in 1981, he inducted all coal miners into the army and literally forced production back to a reasonable level. Efficiency did not improve, but by compelling the miners to work longer hours production did rise. By 1983 national income had begun to grow again, but the hope now was simply to maintain the levels of the early 1970s, not to create any socialist utopias. Consistently with his line that he was only implementing the reforms of

the Solidarity period without the disruptive activity of the union, Jaruzelski adopted economic reforms worked out before the imposition of martial law. Those reforms, which had been created by five hundred economists with vastly differing views, were haphazard, inconsistent, and futile, despite their nod to the Hungarian experience. They called for wider use of market mechanisms but retained central planning; they emphasized self-management but left power in the factories in the hands of enterprise directors; and they praised the freeing of prices but continued to control most of them. Jaruzelski probably did not understand these failings and he certainly could not provide the insight to overcome them. When problems emerged he appointed special commissioners, often military men, to fix them according to the old methods of direct command, so that despite much talk of reform, direct intervention in the economy actually increased during the 1980s.5° Since, as Martin Myant concluded, “the essence of the system of management was barely altered,” the results were predictable: debt continued to rise, investment and wages rose much faster than

productivity, trade with the West dropped dramatically, and the standard of living barely stabilized.%7

The most damaging aspect of Jaruzelski’s economic policy was a turn back to the Soviet Union. Hungary’s solution for its debt problem was to open itself somewhat to world markets, a decision that laid the groundwork for relatively rapid economic progress in the 1990s. Jaruzelski, by contrast, believed that he could sidestep the constraints imposed by Western sanctions and by Poland’s poor international credit through expanding trade with the Soviet Union. By

1985 some three hundred of the largest production facilities in Poland had become essentially appendices to their Soviet counterparts, and 37 percent of Polish industrial production was going to the Soviet Union.38 Unable to import new technology from the West and tied into the slipshod Soviet market, Polish industry became less and less able to compete even in the sheltered CMEA marketplace. Poland’s eastward reorientation during the 1980s was one of the most onerous economic legacies of the Jaruzelski period. When the Soviet market completely collapsed in 1990, Poland was left with an enormous trade deficit and many large, obsolete industrial plants oriented in the wrong direction.

1440 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

When by 1986 it had become clear that ad hoc interventions to fix the economy were not working, Jaruzelski used the occasion of the Tenth Party Congress to propose a “speeding up of the process” into a “second stage” of reform. Prime Minister Messner’s first proposal to the Sejm in October 1986, however, was so strongly centralizing that a storm of protests from economists and editorial writers forced its withdrawal. By this time it was clear to almost everyone that

more contact with world markets and less interference from the center were required. After further input from the various party organizations concerned with the economy, in April 1987 the Commission of Economic Reform published a package of 174 measures for debate, and in October of that year Prime Minister Messner placed the final program before the Sejm.

In many respects these “second stage” reforms were quite similar to those of 1981, but in at least two regards they constituted a significant step. First, they proposed a reorientation of Polish trade away from the ruble market by reemphasizing exports and by switching from direct to indirect controls on foreign trade, something Wiodzimierz Brus had called for more than twenty years previously. Second, they proposed expanding the possibilities of joint ventures and permitting the creation of private firms with an unlimited number of employees. The first reform was important, but the second was fundamental. For the first time in socialist Poland the principle of private capital would be established in law. On the other hand, it also opened the door for well-placed officials to “privatize” state assets to their advantage.

Public reaction to the revised proposals varied. Since the plan called for austerity measures, including significantly higher prices, OPZZ, the National Trade Union under Miodowicz, which was emerging as a populist advocate of short-term worker interests, complained that incomes policy did not adequately compensate the worker for the price increases. OPZZ also opposed the introduction of private property as a matter of principle. Many Solidarity economists, on the other hand, had evolved to the point of advocating a mixed economy of both public and private property. But Solidarity continued to insist that without a democratization that would break the power of the nomenklatura, no economic reform was possible. The first necessity in Polish politics, it argued, was political reform, which meant primarily bringing Solidarity into a real partnership with the party in conducting public affairs. The party agreed that democratization was needed, but it was not ready to bring Solidarity on board quite yet. “This government is willing to share power, ’ the editor of Nowe Drogi (New Roads) noted; but, he added, “not on a 50-50 basis. The party will hold the deciding power.”5? “Pluralism in a socialist frame-

work” now became the government's watchword. Despite the derisive comments of the opposition, this idea constituted a real advance over martial law, not to mention over Stalinism. Its first test came only shortly after the economic reform measures reached the Sejm. In October 1987 Messner surprised both the opposition and some party members by announcing that the government would

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 141

conduct a referendum on November 29, 1987. The referendum asked two specific questions: Do you favor the package of economic reforms just placed before the Sejm even if it means two or three years of sacrifice?; and Do you favor the Polish model of “profound democratization?” Politically, the referendum was an astute move. If it succeeded, Jaruzelski

could go ahead with price rises and other painful changes. If it lost, he could present himself to the Western powers from whom he was seeking debt relief as having done the best he could but having been defeated by a shortsighted public. The referendum once again put Solidarity on the spot. “If we say yes, were giving allegiance to something we don’t trust,” one Solidarity activist said. “But we also cannot say ‘Don't vote, or we would be portrayed as against reform. 6! The results shocked everyone. Sixty-eight percent of the electorate voted, and almost two-thirds of them voted yes. But since the positive votes on the two questions came to only 44 percent and 46 percent, respectively, of the total electorate, the government declared that the propositions had lost. General astonishment! Had the government intended to lose? Why else would it fail to falsify the vote as it had presumably done in the past? Was it a devious plot to court the West? A provocation of some kind? Or did the apparat draw back at the last minute at the prospect of the social unrest that real reform might provoke? Whatever lay behind the government’s unexpectedly ethical handling of the vote, the referendum of November 1987 broke a logjam. Shortly after its completion the Warsaw Regional Executive Committee of Solidarity declared that “all of us in Solidarity realize at last that we have entered a new phase... we know for

certain: the war is over.... The Polish referendum proves that the restructuring of the economy, of social ties, and of public life cannot be achieved against the wishes of society.... We are ready to enter [into an ‘anti-crisis’] pact for the common good, but on one condition: that our right to express and represent social interests is respected.”62 In January 1988 Polityka published an open letter by Jerzy Holzer, a prominent Solidarity historian, urging that Jaruzelski and Walesa agree to a “historic pact” to rescue the nation, and shortly thereafter historian Bronislaw Geremek, one of Walesa’s closest advisors, suggested an “anti-crisis pact” between the government and Solidarity. The government too was more conciliatory early in 1988. For example, in January it announced legislation to permit public service for conscientious objectors to the draft, thus responding to protests that WiP had been making for several years. In Marchthe party formally acknowledged that it had organized the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, which it now admitted for the first time was a “political error” contrary to the tradition “of Polish tolerance” and “contradictory to Marxist ideology.” Solidarity, however, remained outlawed, its leaders harassed, and many official statements indicated that whatever plans for “pluralism in a socialist context” the government might have, they did not include the union.

1442 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

STRIKES AND THE ROUNDTABLE Then, once again, in the familiar Polish way, strikes intervened. The referendum’s defeat did not mean the need for reform had disappeared. On February 1, 1988, Messner’s government went ahead with price increases that pushed the cost

of food up 50 percent. Protests erupted, and with the coming of spring strike season at the end of April substantial work stoppages took place in Silesia and Gdansk, among other places. Massive wage increases settled some of the strikes, but security forces finally had to storm Nowa Huta, the steel mill in Krakow, to end the strike there. A few days later an uneasy compromise worked out with the participation of Lech Walesa ended a nine-day strike in Gdansk. Solidarity had not foreseen or organized these strikes, nor did it support them wholeheartedly. In Gdansk Walesa merely said, “I am not on strike, although I am not against it.” The stoppages shook the Solidarity leadership because some of the most vigorous of the younger strikers were not only not part of the Solidarity movement, they were even hostile to the old Solidarity leadership, “the senators” who in their view no longer represented the real needs of the young workers.*¢ Wiktor Kulerski believed that the strikes, being outside of the control of the union, had completed the destruction of the myth of Solidarity as a mass movement. But Kulerski was wrong in two ways. He was right that the old Solidarity, unified more in the memory of an intelligentsia that cherished an ideal of social cohesion than it had been in reality, no longer existed. But this was not necessarily bad because what had taken its place was a vibrant and vigorous independent society in which dynamic citizen initiatives of all kinds were emerging, including those of the angry young workers. Constant pressure applied by activists both within and outside of the organized opposition, coupled with Jaruzelski’s will-

ingness to respond to that pressure, had produced a real opening of the public space. In its own way Poland was becoming a pluralist society, still at this point in a socialist framework but moving with increasing speed in the direction of a fully open society. Kulerski was also wrong in suggesting that the myth of Solidarity was dead. In fact, that myth, actualized in the person of Lech Walesa, remained the union’s greatest strength, as the second wave of strikes in August showed. Still illegal, divided into competing regional councils, unable to attract the youngest and most radical workers, and outmaneuvered by a regime that was more intelligent and incomparably better at manipulation than its predecessors, Solidarity (especially its logo) remained the symbol of the emerging independent society and Walesa remained its personification. The power of these Polonified representations of freedom and hope contrasted sharply with the complete lack of emotional attachments the regime could bring to bear, so much so that it had almost completely abandoned its dependence on ideology. Since 1986 at the latest, party leaders had “recognized the opposition as a lasting element on the country’s political map” and in cautious ways they had been putting out feelers to that opposition ever since.°* That is why, when in August 1988 a second wave of strikes erupted, this time much

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 143

more severe and much more widespread than in May, the government finally decided, after almost seven years of stonewalling, that it was time to negotiate openly with Solidarity, the enemy whom, at least, it knew. ° At first Minister of Defense General Kiszczak announced drastic measures just short of martial law.*8 But, after an overture on August 25 by Walesa and a crucial politburo meeting the next day, during which Jaruzelski proposed a roundtable discussion with the opposition without conditions, on August 27 Kiszczak publicly offered Solidarity direct political negotiations rather than simply economic discussions.°? Jaruzelski immediately criticized Messner’s government and called for “a courageous turnabout” in policy. On August 31 Kiszczak called Walesa to Warsaw and offered to discuss even the legalization of Solidarity,

which remained the union’s primary goal, if Walesa would get the workers to return to their jobs.” Walesa knew he could not refuse such an offer, even though breaking a strike yet one more time might undermine his authority.7! Indeed, Kiszczak is alleged to have said after meeting with Walesa that he did not think the Solidarity leader

could produce, and Bronistaw Geremek reports that Watesa’s closest advisors thought he had made a terrible mistake.72 But one of Walesa’s greatest strengths as a pre-1989 politician was his sense of timing. Like his radical opponents in the opposition, such as Andrzej Gwiazda and Leszek Moczulski, Watesa could be intransigent, but where he rose above them was in his understanding of when the moment for a deal had arrived. This time he correctly saw the possibility of a major breakthrough. Besides, he never lacked confidence that he could talk to the people. In three days of shouting, arm waving, and nonstop negotiations, the workers were back on the job and the government was committed.

Under the new circumstances, Messner, the economic technician who had failed to fix the economy, had clearly outlived his usefulness. On October 17 Mieczystaw Rakowski replaced him as prime minister. Rakowski is one of the most curious figures in Polish politics. Well known in the West as a liberal Communist because of his editorship of Polityka, which occasionally published critical views, he produced interesting analyses on occasion, as in 1987 when he warned of a “revolutionary upheaval” in Eastern Europe unless its ruling parties abandoned “useless ideas and outdated concepts.” But among oppositionists Rakowski was considered a slippery opportunist who had behaved badly in the negotiations at the time of the Bydgoszcz crisis in 1981. His dislike of Watesa, whom he once called an “organ grinder,’ boded ill for creating a true partnership with the union.73 Rakowski was a more aggressive prime minister than Messner had been, both

in economic terms and in his dealings with the opposition. He withdrew some of the crucial economic reforms still before the Sejm, resubmitted them in more radical form, and got them through. By making certain kinds of privatization easier, these new rules facilitated the bailout of nervous members of the nomenklatura into lucrative semiprivate enterprises. Accommodating to the desires of his colleagues to enrich themselves, Rakowski presented an unyielding face to

1444 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the opposition, although in the long run he favored a deal. By nature Rakowski was a hardnosed negotiator. Solidarity leaders were little surprised, therefore, when the new prime minister announced, as he had in 1982, that the government would negotiate only with the “constructive opposition” and not with “aggressive anti-Communists” like Wiadistaw Frasyniuk, Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, and the like, all of whom were included in Solidarity’s proposed negotiating team. When Walesa quite naturally rejected that condition the preliminary meetings about organizing a roundtable were postponed indefinitely. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that the government would, as it had in the past, continue to find excuses why it could not meet with Solidarity, always probing for a slip on Watesa’s part that would permit Rakowski to blame him for scuttling the talks. But Walesa did not slip, even when Rakowski blandly announced that to further the process of improving economic efficiency, the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk—the cradle of Solidarity and Watesa’s workplace—would be closed. The shipyard was not closed, although its workforce began a steady and permanent decline, but this not particularly subtle maneuver depressed even the relatively moderate opposition activists. “The very idea of coming to an agreement...is politically and socially finished,” said Zbigniew Bujak.” For the more radical oppositionists, Rakowski'’s move simply confirmed their position that it was pointless, even traitorous, to negotiate with a regime that, in their view, had no intention of real reconciliation and would only break its agreements. At the very time of this apparently discouraging series of events the shape of a compromise was taking form. Late in 1988 Rakowski, according to his own account, conceived of the idea of a Gorbachev-style election in which the party would retain control but would be able to claim an electoral mandate.’> He proposed the idea to Jaruzelski. After private discussions with Rakowski and other government representatives, Catholic emissaries brought the proposal to the Solidarity leadership. The delay these machinations caused in the start of the roundtable discussions provided Walesa’s team valuable time to organize itself into a more cohesive bargaining unit. Watesa gathered his associates around him in a “Citizens’ Committee,” with subcommittee chairmen forming what amounted to a shadow cabinet. He was able to shrug off the frustrations of dealing with Rakowski and to maintain that a negotiated partnership was not only possible but was the only route to a revived Poland. In 1985 Walesa had said, “In the more or less near future the government will be induced to negotiate, it will not be able to do otherwise.... Whether the meeting takes place now or later is unimportant. The meeting is inevitable.”7° When such a meeting became possible in August 1988 and critics attacked him for negotiating with the enemy, he responded: “I would negotiate with the devil himself if it would help Poland.”77 Jaruzelski had somewhat more trouble making his preparations. Having gotten his government into the proper position in October 1988, in December 1988 he had Rakowski tell a central committee plenum that the party needed

to find a new approach to trade union pluralism, by which he meant that

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 145

after insisting for years it was impossible, he nonetheless intended to legalize Solidarity. Messner had gone quietly, but the reaction in the party to this proposal was furious and outspoken. The December plenum broke up without making a decision and reconvened in mid-January 1989. Most of the speakers at this second session rejected trade union pluralism with such vigor that it appeared Jaruzelski’s resolution might fail. At this point the general rolled out his heavy artillery, threatening to resign and to take General Kiszczak and General Florian Siwicki, minister of national defense, with him.78 Alarmed lest their strongest political figures abandon them and also not quite ready to forego long-held habits of following the leader, the central committee voted 142 to 32, with 14 abstentions, to lift, “in conditions of national agreement, restrictions on creating new trade unions.” The conditions set for negotiations were potentially onerous, but they were not impossible. Solidarity had to define itself “as part of socialism,” break relations with extremist groups, and forego foreign financial aid, but no mention was made of excluding people like Michnik and Geremek. A few days after the plenum Walesa accepted the restrictions not as conditions but rather as the regime’s statement of its negotiating position, and on February 6, 1989, the discussions began. The symbolism of a roundtable (it actually existed—a huge, specially constructed round table twenty-eight feet in diameter and seating fifty-seven persons, although it was only used for the opening and closing ceremonies) was to minimize the confrontational aspects of the negotiations and suggest the community of interests of all Poles.8° This is why the government insisted that several agencies, not just Solidarity, the government, and the party, participate in the negotiations. A demoralized and now obviously obsolete PRON participated and the two tame political parties, the United Peasant party and the Democratic party, were there. The church was not formally represented, although Archbishop Bronistaw Dabrowski, Bishop Alojzy Orszulik, and others played a key role in providing “objective” mediation at key points in the negotiations. Several independent intellectuals completed the roster of fifty-seven main negotiators. Even the underground media, such as Tygodnik Mazowsze and Radio Solidarity, which

were technically illegal, could be found furiously interviewing participants in hallways and cloakrooms. All in all, over the next two months more than five hundred persons took part in the various sessions and subsessions organized around the three main working groups discussing union law, economic issues, and political reorganization. Despite the size and extent of the negotiations, the basic deal had already been cut at the highest level. Solidarity would be legalized, and an election would be arranged in such a way as to insure the party’s continued predominance. This is why Walesa, when asking Geremek to represent him at the political working group rather than the union working group, apologized, saying the great victory would come at the union group where Solidarity would be recognized, whereas it was in the political group that the demoralizing compromises on elections would have to be made.*! In fact, it was in the political subgroup that the most important

1446 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

decisions were thrashed out, particularly the agreement to create a senate, which Walesa later told Geremek was “our greatest success.” While discussions went on in hundreds of specialized meetings in dozens of subcommittees, direct meetings continued between Walesa and Kiszczak, both of whom proved to be conciliatory and receptive negotiators. Their discussions were no longer about whether Solidarity would reenter public life but under what conditions. Solidarity knew that the government was offering it a new social contract: legalization and minority representation in parliament, which would mean accepting coresponsibility for an economic program and any hardship it might cause, in return for validating elections and the creation of a strong presidency, which would mean, presumably, that the party would retain ultimate control over the political process. Two months after the official negotiations began, Walesa formally accepted the offer.

SOLIDARITY TAKES POWER The accords announced on April 6, 1989, met Solidarity’s first and foremost demand since December 13, 1981: relegalization of the union, a step that registration on April 18 completed. An economic plan was announced as well, as were promises of greater access to the media, a more independent judiciary, and freedom of association. Accordingly, one week after the talks concluded, Tygodnik Mazowsze published its last underground issue, revealing the hitherto unknown

names of its female staff and reappearing in a few weeks as Gazeta Wyborcza (Election Gazette) under the editorship of Adam Michnik. The paper’s publisher, Helena Luczywo, went on over the next decade to build Poland’s most sophisticated and successful media empire, Agora. There is no question, however, that the constitutional innovations were the most important part of the accords. The negotiators began suspicious and hostile to each other, but as the talks progressed both sides developed a working relationship and began to think of how to resolve contentious issues.8? To get an agreement that would lead to fully free elections by 1993, Solidarity agreed to what was termed a “nonconfrontational” election. That is, 65 percent of the seats in the national legislature, the Sejm, would be contested only by the Polish United Workers’ party (PUWP) and its satellite parties, and 35 percent of the seats would be elected from among opposition or independent candidates.83 The communists wanted a strong presidency, which they thought they could control, so agreed to balance that provision by creating a second legislative body, the Senate, which would be elected in an open and free ballot. The Senate would have a veto power, which the Sejm could override by a two-thirds majority (i.e., slightly more than 65 percent). The two houses of the legislature together would elect the president. This remarkable agreement clearly resonated with the first relatively open elections Gorbachev held in the Soviet Union at roughly the same time. But the

Polish arrangements went much further than the Soviet ones, conceding substantial representation to the opposition. On the other hand, by agreeing to

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 147

an election in only two months, Walesa seemed to give the government apparatus every chance to dominate the disorganized and squabbling opposition. “Solidarity...cannot count on mass enthusiasm to make up for its organizational disadvantages,” said one analyst.84 Even Walesa himself complained. “None of us want these elections,” he said. “They're the terrible price we have to pay in order to get our union back.”’85 And those were the optimists.8¢ The radical faction “Fighting Solidarity,’ which opposed the very concept of reconciliation with

the Communists as “tantamount to reconciliation with captivity,” called for a boycott of the elections. As one skeptic put it, “I don’t trust the Communists. This is the basis of my political analysis.”87

Many believed that the party, with its organization and funds, held a significant advantage, but its campaign proved to be lifeless. While at Solidarity headquarters eager volunteers bustled in and out and mimeograph machines thumped all day long, at party election headquarters bored typists sat idle at their machines. Communist party campaign posters appeared in every color but red, and official candidates tried never to mention that they were party members. Despite these obvious indications of malaise, many party people seemed to think they would do at least all right in the elections, while some Solidarity activists worried that a public they had been calling apathetic would not respond. Walesa, the optimist, hoped Solidarity could win about two-thirds of the contested seats. In any event, John Tagliabue reported in the New York Times, “Poland's bold experiment in democracy poses no immediate threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. 88

The election results, therefore, were a sensation. After a runoff, Solidarity candidates won all of the 161 seats they contested in the Sejm and all but one of the 100 seats available in the Senate. Even more amazing, since the election procedures permitted voters to cross off names they did not want, 33 of the 35 major Communist figures, including Prime Minister Rakowski, General Kisczak, and OPZZ leader Miodowicz, failed to get the required 50 percent of the vote in the first election on June 4. Since the voting rules stipulated that in such a case a candidate could not stand again in the runoff, it meant that most of the main party leadership would not be represented in the Sejm. Realizing that “too big a percentage of our people getting through would be disturbing and might force a fight on us, Walesa immediately entered into negotiations that permitted the defeated men to run again, but in the end they withdrew anyway.®? The magnitude of the voters’ rejection of the Communists was overwhelming. This was no quibbling over whether 60 percent or 78 percent of the populace showed up to vote. Could the communists possibly continue in power in the face of such utter annihilation at the polls? For Solidarity the problem was different: how to deal with sudden and unexpected prosperity. “I face the disaster of having

had a good crop,’ Watesa quipped. “Too much grain has ripened for me and | cant store it all in my granary.’ Almost immediately after the election Jaruzelski proposed that Solidarity enter into a coalition government, but Walesa refused. At this point very few

1448 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Solidarity leaders believed the union should enter the government, let alone seize the opportunity to form their own government. Their plan was to provide a responsible opposition, learn parliamentary tactics, and win the election of 1993. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, writing in Tygodnik Solidarnos¢ (Solidarity Weekly), argued that it would be a mistake to enter into a government in which “the army and the police are still in the hands of the ruling party.” In his view Solidarity was strong enough to “enforce reforms in parliament without taking on the responsibility of government.’?! Adam Michnik was one of the few who believed that

Solidarity should grab for the brass ring. He surprised and even angered many when early in July he suggested in Gazeta Wyborcza that to satisfy the Russians the Communists should retain the strengthened office of president but Solidarity should form the government. His slogan, “Your President; Our Premier,” reminds one of “The New Social Contract,” the proposal of the Hungarian opposition in 1987 that suggested giving the Communists the executive branch and the opposition the legislative branch in a system of separated powers.°2 Even Michnik’s idea, the most radical of the postelection period, remained self-limiting, not yet quite

able to countenance the idea of completely eliminating the Communist party, still apparently the strongest element in society. During the period between the elections and the final selection of Mazowiecki

as prime minister, Poland experienced its first taste of real politics since the 1930s, and maybe before. With each side uncertain of its support and unclear about the consequences of its actions, the outcome was far from ordained. The first order of business was for the Sejm to elect a president. Jaruzelski, fearing public resentment of his role in imposing martial law, declared he would not run, although the strong presidency had been expressly created for him. Even among the Communists he faced so much opposition that his advisors thought he might fall as many as fifty votes short in the Sejm. He proposed General Kiszczak for president. But this choice proved even more unpopular. After lengthy discussions, including encouragement from U.S. President George H. W. Bush, Jaruzelski finally returned as the sole candidate. On July 19, after a delay of almost two weeks, the Sejm elected him president. Walesa told members of the Citizens Parliamentary Club (Obywatelski Klub Parlamentarny—OKP), the organization of Solidarity members in the Sejm, to vote as their consciences dictated, which for most of them meant voting against their great enemy of the last ten years. Obviously, however, the Solidarity leadership had decided that after having rejected Kiszczak, stability required Jaruzelski. When, during the actual voting in the Sejm, careful counting revealed the general was about to lose, just the requisite number of senior Solidarity representatives invalidated their negative ballots to permit Jaruzelski to receive exactly 50 percent plus one of the valid votes cast. The vote for president revealed three things: first, Solidarity intended to keep its power-sharing agreement with the Communists; second, it had the power to disrupt that agreement; and third, the United Peasant party and the Democratic party, some of whose members had voted against Jaruzelski, were not firmly in

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 149

the Communist camp any more. All three of these factors influenced the hardball politics that followed Jaruzelski’s election. Now Jaruzelski tried to install Kiszczak as prime minister. On August 2 the Sejm approved the nomination, but only after extreme pressure from Jaruzelski held wavering representatives from the United Peasant party and the Democratic party in line behind his proposal. Without any possibility of including Solidarity members in his cabinet and facing incipient rebellion from the traditional coalition of satellite parties, Kiszczak found it impossible to form a government. He

suggested that United Peasant party chairman Roman Malinowski take his place, but this old warhorse had become completely unacceptable to everyone, even to many members of his own party. This was the moment when it finally sank in that the end was in sight—even Malinowski could not make it! Wildcat strikes and a one-hour protest strike led by Solidarity exacerbated the situation. Adding to the tension, the Rakowski government decided this was a good time to marketize the food distribution system. When it lifted price controls on food, froze farm subsidies, and ended meat rationing on August I, prices shot up and the public reacted.

In this tense and unresolved situation, Walesa brought forward a new proposal designed to take advantage of the increasing restiveness of the satellite parties while at the same time reassuring the Communists. On August 7 he announced Solidarity would be ready to form a coalition with the satellite parties that would produce a parliamentary majority for an opposition cabinet. The defection of the satellite parties was an eventuality no one had foreseen. Conditioned to think of the United Peasant party and the Democratic party as completely subservient to the PUWP, no one had considered the consequences of allocating 22 percent of the seats in the Sejm to them and only 38 percent to the PUWP (5 percent had gone to Catholic interests, also originally considered subservient to the Communists). Now, by bringing those two parties into its own coalition, Solidarity proposed turning the roundtable on the Communists, so to speak. Naturally the Communists complained bitterly, and even Izvestia reproached Solidarity for breaching the agreement..2 On August 15 Watesa responded by suggesting the opposition would be willing to form a government with the Communists controlling those ministries concerned with “the physical continuity of the state,” that is, the ministries of defense and interior, traditionally

the keys to social control in Communist states. At the same time he attempted to reassure the Soviets that Poland must remain committed to the Warsaw Pact. Solidarity was now proposing a coalition government, but with the balance of power in their own favor—a reversal of Jaruzelski’ s offer of June.

Jaruzelski, apparently assured of a strong position as president and noting that the Soviets were taking a wait-and-see attitude, accepted. Walesa proposed three candidates for prime minister of the new government: Bronislaw Geremek, the historian; Jacek Kuron, the grand old radical accommodator; and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, an advisor to Solidarity from the days of its formation in 1980. Of these, only Mazowiecki, the devout Catholic intellectual, was satisfactory to the

I50 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

church, which added its final note to the trialogue of the 1980s at this point. On August 18 Jaruzelski announced that he had accepted Kiszczak’s resignation, and the next day he asked Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form a government. Quite naturally, Prime Minister Rakowski was not happy about losing his job to a Solidarity government. This was not simply personal. He probably agreed with Jerzy Urban, who correctly predicted that if the Communists came into opposition, they would lose power altogether. At this point Mikhail Gorbachev provided the final nudge. Rakowski had become head of the party in July when Jaruzelski was elevated to the presidency and as such was expected to check in with the Soviet leader. On this basis, not because of the dramatic Polish developments, on August 22 the two spoke for about 45 minutes. Gorbachev was highly critical of the Polish leadership, calling it “crap,” but he declined to offer any political advice and Rakowski apparently did not ask for any.°5 In 1982 Rakowski had said “sooner or later we'll have to live with them, I’m afraid.’ That time had come. On August 24, 1989, the Sejm overwhelmingly approved Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s cabinet and installed him as the first nonCommunist prime minister of an East European state in almost forty years. The sad-faced Mazowiecki was so overwhelmed that he fainted during the ceremonies. No wonder. The dramatic turn of events left the entire world somewhat lightheaded.

NOTES 1. “Even in Hungary...the brakes look more powerful than the engines,” wrote Timothy Garton Ash in December 1988 (The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe [New York: Random House, 1989], 298). 2. Keesing’s, 31,854. 3. The Polish acronym for the Military Council for National Salvation is WRON. Adding

the letter “a” turns the word into “wrona,” which is Polish for “crow,” which in turn was the slang expression for the Nazi eagle. Solidarity publicists made use of this coincidence (Irena Grudzinska-Gross, “The Art of Solidarity,” International Popular Culture 3 [1985]). 4. David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 151.

5. Leszek Lechowicz, “The Mass Media under Martial Law,” Poland Watch | (1982): 41-49,

6. The Association of Journalists continued to meet privately but was not reestablished until 1989.

7. Cardinal Wyszinski died in May, 1981. “Primate” means that the holder of that rank is senior to the other seventy or so bishops in Poland and is considered the main representative of the Catholic church in that country. Glemp was elevated to cardinal early in 1983. The Soviet secret services, who felt they had good contacts with about fifty Polish bishops, were quite happy when Glemp succeeded Wyszynski because they believed he was not as anti-Soviet as his iron willed predecessor (Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB [New York: Basic Books, 2001], 526).

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 151

8. For a brief but excellent review of the church-related opposition, see Aleksander Smolar, “The Polish Opposition since December 1981,” Occasional Paper 14 (Washington, D.C.: East European Program, European Institute, The Wilson Center, 1988), 31-42. Smolar’s short monograph, which is a superb review of its subject, also appears in Crisis and Reform in Eastern Europe, ed. Ferenc Fehér and Andrew Arato (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 175-252. See also Tadeusz

Walendowski, “The Polish Church under Martial Law,” Poland Watch | (1982): 54-62; and Tadeusz Walendowski, “Controversy over the Church,” Poland Watch 2 (1982-1983): 39-44.

9. Mieczyslaw Rakowski, quoted by Jane Cave, “The Banning of Solidarity,” Poland Watch 2 (1982-1983): 2. Rakowski went on to add, with the crocodile tears that were his trademark, “Those were our hopes. History has shown how baseless they were.” 10. Quoted in Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992), by editor Paul Wilson, 126. 11. Jacek Kuron, “Theses on what to do in an Impossible Situation,” in Solidarity under Siege, ed. Andrzej Tymowski (New Haven: D. H. Back Press, 1982), 57.

12. The following are taken from Zbigniew Bujak, “Trench Warfare,” and Wiktor Kulerski, “A Third Possibility,” in Solidarity under Siege, 58-63. 13. Macej Lopinski, Marcin Moskit, and Mariusz Wilk, Konspira: Solidarity Underground, trans. Jane Cave (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 64. See also the use-

ful remarks by Bujak and Kulerski in Michael T. Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland, A Nation in Conspiracy (New York: Random House, 1989), 94-98. 14. Smolar, “The Polish Opposition Since December 1981,” 11-30. 15. Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, trans. Maya Latynski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 55-58. 16. This paragraph relies on Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 17. Bujak estimated that something like 1.2 million people read the underground press at its peak (Lopinski et al., Konspira, 184). 18. Alfred B. Gruba (pseud.), “Fighting Solidarity,’ Uncensored Poland | (January 12, 1984).

19. KOS, January 20, 1982, quoted by Smolar, “The Polish Opposition Since December 1981,” 12.

20. Sejan (pseud.), “Coming out of the Fog,” Uncensored Poland 15 (August 2, 1984): 29-42; and John Rensenbrink, Poland Challenges a Divided World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 139-141. 21. Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces, 48. 22. Leonid Brezhnev died a few hours before Walesa’s release. David Ost tells the following Warsaw joke: “Jaruzelski says to Brezhnev: “We must at least release Walesa already.’ Brezhnev: ‘Over my dead body” (Ost, Solidarity, 154). 23. Fora thorough discussion of how the principles of martial law were incorporated into the law by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and by amendments to the constitution, the “special regulations during the period of overcoming the socioeconomic crisis,” and other regulations, see Jane Cave, “The Legacy of Martial Law,” Poland Watch 4 (1984): 1-20. For other details see Jane Cave, “The Suspension of Martial Law,” Poland Watch 2 (1982-1983): 45-52. Because these rules made many of the objectionable policies of the martial law era permanent, the church actually opposed the lifting of martial law.

152. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

24. George Kolankiewicz, “Poland and the Politics of Permissible Pluralism,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 2 (1988): 169. 25. Keesing’s, 32,449.

26. “Solidarity Today: A Program Statement Issued by the Interim Coordinating Commission of Solidarity,” Poland Watch 2 (1982-1983): 127-132. 27. Lech Walesa, A Way of Hope (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 257-260. 28. Walesa, A Way of Hope, 293. 29. Keesing’s, 33,876. 30. David Ost, “Poland Revisited,” Poland Watch 7 (1984): 75. 31. Irena Grudzinska-Gross, “Review of the Polish Press: The Politics of Appropriation,” Poland Watch 4 (1984): 21-25. 32. Solidarity’s calls for boycott, along with its analysis of election results, can be found in the appropriate issues of Uncensored Poland for 1984 and 1985. 33. J. C. [Jane Cave], “Elections to the People’s Councils,” Poland Watch 6 (1984): 13-21; and Keesing’s, 34,059. 34. See Weigel, Witness to Hope, 461-464; and James Ramon Felak, “Faith and Nation in Troubled Times: John Paul II’s 1983 Pilgrimage to Poland,” paper presented at the AAASS convention, Philadelphia, November 2008. 35. Keesing’s, 32,448. 36. Quoted by Tadeusz Walendowicz, “The Pope in Poland,” Poland Watch 3 (1983): 8.

37. This information is from an interview of December 7, 1982, reported by Tadeusz Kaminski, “Poland’s Catholic Church and Solidarity: A Parting of the Ways?” Poland Watch 6 (1984): 83.

38. Maya Latynski, “The Church: Between State and Society,” Poland Watch 5 (1984): 22. 39. For example, in the hymn “God, who watches over Poland,” he ordered the refrain “O

Lord, restore a free Fatherland,” which had been written in the nineteenth century, when Poland did not exist as a fully independent state, to become “O Lord, bless our Fatherland” (Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces, 136). 40. For others see Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces, 136-137. 41. Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces, 140-141, quoting a sermon from August 1984.

42. This account relies on Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces; Jane Cave, “The Murder of Father Popieluszko,” Poland Watch 7 (1985): 1-26; and the detailed press reports in Uncensored Poland. 43. The only other officials charged with aiding the murder were generals Wiadystaw Ciaston, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs; and Zenon Platek, head of church surveillance in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Both were arrested in 1990 and acquitted in 1994 for insufficient evidence, but their acquittals were overturned on appeal. Ciaston eventually was acquitted in 2002, while Platek’s retrial was suspended in 2000 due to his ill health and was never taken up again. 44. Urban had commented, “Even Solidarity activists can get drunk and freeze to death in alleys” (Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces, 148). Urban also said “everyone knew of cases in which priests had vanished for short periods in order to escape from their vows of chastity.” After 1989, Urban, who played a clever but nasty role in the interplay between the government and Solidarity, created one of Poland’ s most outrageous and most popular periodicals, Nie (No). For a sketch of this remarkable character, see Lawrence Weschler, “The Troll’s Tale: Jerzy Urban,” in his Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 151-181.

CHAPTER 4 « Solidarity 153 45. Olszowski’s dismissal was occasioned in part by a love affair. Two years later he was in Queens, New York, living what the New York Times called “an anonymous middleclass life” with the woman he loved (New York Times, May 20, 1988). 46. Jacek Kuron, “We Must Not Waste This Opportunity,” East European Reporter 2, no. 2 (1986): 26-27. See the same journal, volumes 2 and 3, for several timely analytical articles from the underground press on the confusion surrounding the formation of the Solidarity Provisional Council. 47. The other members were Bogdan Borusewicz, Zbigniew Bujak, Wtadislaw Frasyniuk, Tadeusz Jenynak, Bogdan Lis, Janusz Patubicki, and Jézef Pinior (“Establishment of Solidarity’s Provisional Council,” East European Reporter 2, no. 2 [1986]: 25). 48. Ost, Solidarity, 174. 49. Ost, Solidarity, 175. 50. Jeri Laber, “Different Strokes in the Eastern Bloc,” New York Times, November 23, 1987.

51. Apparently Glemp told George Bush’s people on the occasion of the vice president’s visit to Poland late in 1987 that he considered Solidarity a closed chapter in Poland’s history John Tagliabue, “Lech! Lech! Lech!” New York Times Magazine, October 23, 1988, 41).

52. This paragraph is based on Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Kenney chronicles a truly remarkable number of small groups, students, and others who became activated in various ways throughout Central Europe, but mostly in Poland, during the second half of the 1980s. 53. Quoted by Lawrence Weschler, “Deficit,” The New Yorker, May 11, 1992, 46. 54. Keesing’s, 31,390. 55. In 1980 and 1981 in particular Poles showed great interest in the Hungarian reforms. See Zvi Gitelman, “Is Hungary the Future of Poland?” Eastern European Politics and Societies | (1987): 135-159, esp. 150-158.

56. See Barttomiej Kaminski, The Collapse of State Socialism: The Case of Poland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 57. Martin R. Myant, “Poland—The Permanent Crisis?” in Poland: The Economy in the 1980s, ed. Roger A. Clarke (London: Longman, 1989), 9. 58. Arthur R. Rachwald, In Search of Poland: The Superpowers’ Response to Solidarity, 1980-1989 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1990), 36. 59. Ludwik Krasucki, quoted by Michael T. Kaufman, “Warsaw Learns a New Word: ‘Democratization,’ New York Times, February 13, 1987.

60. The term “socialist pluralism” was first introduced in 1982 and by 1988 had become widely accepted in party circles. See Eugeniusz Gorski, “From ‘Socialist’ to Postmodern Pluralism in Poland,” East European Politics and Society, 16, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 257.

61. Quoted by John Tagliabue, “At Solidarity, a Quiet Stand on Changes,” New York Times, October 16, 1987. 62. Statement of December 13, 1987, East European Reporter 3, no. 2 (1988): 34-35. 63. New York Times, February 6, 1988.

64. Jadwiga Staniszkis, “The Obsolescence of Solidarity,” Telos 80 (Summer 1989): 37-50.

65. Martial law destroyed the actuality of the ten-million strong union, Kulerski said, and May 1988 brought the final realization of this real state of affairs “and helped

154. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN destroy a myth” (“After May—What Next?”: A discussion with several activists, East European Reporter 3, no. 3 [1988]: 39).

66. The comment is by Mieczystaw Rakowski, writing in the fall of 1987, as quoted by Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity, 272. David Ost says that preliminary negotiations with some Solidarity representatives started as early as October 1987 (Solidarity, 172). 67. For an outline of the party’s strategy to co-opt Walesa and the “constructive opposition,’ see Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, ed.

Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest: Central European Press, 2010), Doc. 28.

68. At the same time, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was authorized to “begin planning for the imposition of martial law,” although it is not known how far this planning went (Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 [Fall, 2003]: 294).

69. Mieczystaw F. Rakowski, Jak to sie stato (Warszawa: Polska Oficyna Wydawnicza “BGW,” 1991), 117.

70. Archbishop Bronislaw Dabrowski and General Stanislaw Ciosek were also present at this meeting. 71. Within a week of Kiszczak’s offer, Walesa and his advisors had laid out their main goals for the negotiations that were to come. See Documents 6, 7, and 8 in Pawel Machcewicz, “Poland 1986-1989: From ‘Cooptation’ to “Negotiated Revolution” in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, The End of the Cold War 12/13 (Fall/ Winter 2001): 103-106. 72. Tagliabue, “Lech! Lech! Lech!,” 37.

73. This was not a new opinion. In 1967 Leopold Tyrmand wrote a bitter attack on Rakowski that became famous. Among other things, Tyrmand condemned Rakowski as a careerist and arriviste, ridiculed his marriage to a concert violinist, and argued that behind his “liberalism” lay “the beautiful and richly illustrated dossier of a totali-

tarian bully, a Stalinist hireling, a cynical hypocrite, a servile flunky” (“The Hair Styles of Mieczyslaw Rakowski,” in Between East and West: Writings from Kultura, ed. Robert Kostrzewa [New York: Hill & Wang, 1990], 111-131). For the “organ grinder”

comment see Alina Perth-Grabowska, “Poland in the New Year (or, the Downfall of Communism), Studium Papers 13, no. 1 January 1989): 5. For a useful corrective to the one-sided views of Solidarity activists about Rakowski, see Richard Spielman, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of General Wojciech Jaruzelski,” World Politics 37 (1985): 579-582.

74. Maciej Zalewski, “On the Talks That Never Were,” Uncaptive Minds 1, no. 4 (November—December 1988): 18. 75. Rakowski, Jak to sie stato, 193. Bronistaw Geremek believes the idea emerged earlier in the fall, perhaps as early as late October (interview, February 21, 1992). 76. Interview in Journal de Geneve, in JPRS-EER-86-006, January 16, 1986, 124. 77. Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 2 (March-April 1989): 1.

78. Wiktor Osiatynski, “The Roundtable Talks in Poland,” in The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism, ed. Jon Elster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64, fn. 17.

79. New York Times, January 20, 1989.

CHAPTER 4 Solidarity 155 80. The concept did not work. From then until today Poles both on the far left and the far right dismiss the Round Table as either a betrayal of Communist values or as a craven surrender to the communist regime. When Michael D. Kennedy and Brian Porter put together a retrospective scholarly conference on the Round Table ten years later, they received more than 500 impassioned letters of protest (Brian Porter, “Making History and Silencing Memory,” in the two editors’ Negotiating Radical Change: Understanding and Extending the Lessons of the Polish Round Table Talks [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000], http://webapps.lsa.umich.edu/ii/ polishroundtable/negotiatingradicalchange/index.html. 81. Geremek, interview, February 21, 1992. 82. As one of the government’s negotiators later put it, “if we started getting into discussion about past wrongs, we wouldn’t accomplish anything” (Janusz Reykowski, in Kennedy and Porter, Negotiating Radical Change, PDF version, 39). 83. In fact, the party took only 38 percent of the seats for itself, reserving 22 percent for its hitherto servile satellites, the United Peasant party and the Democratic party. They also assigned 5 percent of the seats to the three equally supine Catholic parties: PAX, the Christian Social Union, and the Polish Catholic Social Alliance.

84. Piotr Stasinski, “Hard Bargains at the Round Table,” Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 2 (March-April 1989): 4.

85. Lawrence Weschler, “A Grand Experiment,’ The New Yorker, November 13, 1989: 64.

86. One of the few real optimists was U.S. Ambassador John Davis, who predicted in a cable to Washington on April 19, 1989, that “the authorities...are hoping for some modest success, but they are more likely to meet total defeat and great embarrassment” Warsaw to Secstate, “Election ‘89: The Year of Solidarity,” Document | from Gregory F. Domber, ed., “Solidarity’s Coming Victory: Big or Too Big?” National Security Archive, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB42. Accessed October 15, 2010.

87. “Independence, Liberal-Democratic party and Fighting Solidarity,’ Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 2 (March-April 1989): 6; Kornel Morawiecki, “Boycott the Elections,” Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 3 (May-June-July 1989): 11-12; Leopolita (pseud.), “Why is There So Much Skepticism?” Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 3 (May-June-July 1989): 7. 88. Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Collapse of Communism (New York: Times Books, 1990), 118. The death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran on June 3, coupled with the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, tended to distract Western news agencies from Polish events. 89. Gwertzman and Kaufman, The Collapse of Communism, 120. 90. New York Times, July 7, 1989. 91. FBIS-EEU-89-122, June 26, 1989, 66.

92. Adam Michnik, “Your President, Our Prime Minster,” in his Letters from Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129-131. 93. Fora detailed review of Soviet positions during the crisis, see Michael Shafir, “Soviet Reaction to Polish Developments: Widened Limits of Tolerated Change,” RFE, RAD Background Report/179, Eastern Europe, September 20, 1989. 94 See the article by John Tagliabue, New York Times, August 18, 1989; Michael Simmons characterized Rakowski as “angry” in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 27, 1989.

156 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 95. Rakowski, Jak to sie to stato, 243-245. Gorbachev used the term “ni hriena” (literally “not horseradish”), which is a rough Russian euphemism that is cruder than “junk” but not as vulgar as “shit.” He quickly apologized for using the phrase. According to Svetlana Savranskaya, notes of this conversation do not exist in the Gorbachev archives, as one would expect them to. 96. Oriana Fallaci, “Even an Angel Can Become a Whore,” interview with Rakowski, Washington Post, February 21, 1982.

CHAPTER 5

a,

The Glorious Revolutions of 1989!

As is vacation month in Europe. Parisians abandon their city to the for-

eigners and head for the countryside; Germans flock to the warm waters of Greece; the English working class repairs to the Costa del Sol. Much the same used to happen in Communist Eastern Europe. Yugoslavs overwhelmed their beautiful Adriatic Coast, while Czechs loaded their families in their cars and began their search for inexpensive camping grounds. Traditionally, East Germans were partial to the Bulgarian coast, flooding into the attractive Black Sea Coast resort of Varna. East Germans liked to vacation in Hungary, too; well over one hundred thousand used to vacation there annually. In August of 1989, however, a significant number of East German visitors were attracted to Hungary not by the bucolic beauty of Lake Balaton but by the possibility of finding a way into Austria. Hungary began letting its own citizens visit Austria freely early in 1989, and on May 2 Hungarian border guards began to dismantle the cement, barbed wire, barricades, and obstacles that lined the border between Hungary and Austria. What these East German vacationers realized was that in Hungary, unlike Berlin, where the wall remained in place, the Iron Curtain—the ugly commonplace of a divided Europe—was starting to come down.

Since the construction of the fortified Hungarian border restraints in the mid-1960s, only about three hundred people had successfully crossed into Austria, whereas Hungarian authorities had caught more than thirteen thousand potential escapees.? Now that the barrier was being dismantled and Hungary was plunging ahead with reform, East Germans found that they could slip into Austria with relative ease and within a day finish their journey to their real destination, West Germany. By the time the great onslaught of vacationers hit in August, Austria had already registered 237 such persons, although the actual number probably was much higher. During August the numbers grew exponentially, totaling perhaps as many as six thousand by the end of the month. On one memorable day, August 19, more than two hundred picnickers celebrating

157

158 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

“European unity’ charged an unattended border gate and burst into Austria en masse. By the last ten days of the month thousands of East Germans were gathered along the border looking for ways to sneak across. At the same time these East Germans were leaking into Austria, other East Germans were showing up at West German diplomatic offices in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and even in East Berlin itself, to get their German passports. The Federal Republic considered all Germans automatically citizens of West Germany and issued passports to East Germans virtually on demand. Until 1989, however, the passport was useless, because East Germany had agreements with its Warsaw Pact allies not to honor a West German passport that did not have a valid entry stamp on it. If you did not get into Czechoslovakia on a West German passport you could not get out on one. In the summer of 1989, however, grasping much better than their government the magnitude of the changes underway in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, East Germans began to camp out in West German embassies, which, according to long-established and rigidly observed convention, were considered sovereign German soil. Early in August the Federal Republic had to close its mission in East Berlin because more than 130 East Germans had entered and asked for asylum. A few days later it closed its embassy in Budapest because 180 people had shown up for the same reason. By the end of the month the Prague embassy closed down as well.

HUNGARY’S NEGOTIATED REVOLUTION Hungary had become a focal point for these hopes not only because it was dismantling its border fences but because reform was accelerating there. While the opposition succeeded in bringing tens of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets and in creating new political groupings, the ruling party searched for a new direction. At a key meeting in February 1989 the central committee agreed to go ahead with a decision of the previous year to implement “socialist pluralism” by introducing an actual multiparty system. Claiming that the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ party (the Communists) represented the entire community whereas each opposition group could claim to represent only a small portion of society's interests, party leader Karoly Grosz proposed that this multiparty

democracy be open to all parties willing to accept the legitimacy of socialism, a “controlled division of power,” as he put it.3 When none of the important new groupings—the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz, pronounced SDS), and Alliance of Young Democrats (FIDESz, pronounced FEE-des)—would accept that condition, he tried picking them off individually, offering this one a small bribe or a promise while harassing that one, differentiating between what he called a genuine opposition and a divisive one. Early in April he convened a roundtable of “harmonization and reconciliation” stacked with sympathetic groups. No bona fide opposition party attended Grész’s roundtable. Instead, eight rival opposition groups that had cooperated successfully in organizing the huge

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 159

demonstration of March 15 came together on March 23 to found an Opposition Roundtable, the purpose of which was to face the party/state with a united front, thus thwarting Grosz’s divide-and-rule tactics. The success of the political transformation of Hungary can be laid in significant measure to the unity these disparate groups maintained for the next few months and to their commitment to a negotiated settlement. By the end of the national roundtable, the opposition once again split into its various components, but during the summer of 1989 it held together just long enough to prevent the regime from ramming through a phony multiparty constitution and to create a workable political agreement for the future.

The opposition’s success in creating a united front accelerated the decline of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ party. Early in 1989 regional party leaders established their own association, as did the Young Communist League. More important, the government itself under the leadership of Mikl6s Németh established its independence from the party. Németh replaced many of Gr6sz’s supporters and in May 1989 the party gave up its control over the nomenklatura, that is, its right to review and approve governmental appointments. When control of the Workers’ Guard came under the government's control too, the state’s independence from party control was assured for the first time in a communist regime. Németh proceeded to announce a series of reforms, including the cancellation of the Nagymaros dam project. In fact, so many party members began to announce that they were converting to a reform position that the writer Péter Esterhazy complained of a traffic jam on the road to Damascus.5 In the party itself, a politburo reshuffle in April foreshadowed the final victory of the reformers, which came in June, when a new four-member presidium dominated by Rezs6 Nyers, Imre Pozsgay, and Miklés Németh took over.

With the accession of the real reform Communists, the way was open for serious roundtable discussions to begin, which they did on June 13, 1989, only a few days after the Polish election. Technically the discussions were three-sided, including the party, the opposition, and the party’s satellite organizations, such

as the labor unions, but no one had any illusions about who was confronting whom. A reforming Communist party was negotiating with the representatives of society, or at least groups who claimed to be those representatives, for the purpose of initiating a “peaceful and lawful evolution towards a constitutional multiparty system.” In a public television debate a few days after the start of the discussions, Imre Pozsgay said that the party now accepted the principle of a democratic electoral system with free elections and rival parties. If it did not dominate the elections scheduled for 1990, he said, it would seek to form a coalition. Recognizing the hollowness of the party’s traditional claims of omniscience and abandoning the principles of hyperrationalism, Pozsgay and his colleagues now began to try to pull the mantle of European social democracy over their shoulders. By accepting the ideas of parliamentarianism, democratic socialism as practiced “according to Western European ideas,” and—mirabile dictu—market economics, they began distancing themselves from the ghost of Stalinism as rapidly as they could.®

160 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Roundtable discussions began at a moment of unusual unity among the opposition. Solidarity went into the Polish roundtable discussions as the recognized representative of a large portion of Polish society, but in Hungary none of the opposition groups had widespread backing in society. All of them, therefore, united behind a demand for free elections through which they could establish legitimacy. The reform Communists concluded from the Polish experience that it would be dangerous to fix the proportions of representation in advance. With their large and ubiquitous organization, well-known leaders, and truly reformed program, they believed they could win, or at least run very strongly, in an open election. It was a risk, but the stakes were high—becoming the first Communist party to achieve legitimacy through the ballot box.? By mid-1989 holding free elections was no longer an issue in Hungary, but almost everything else was. During the roundtable discussions the party concentrated on economic problems, hoping to get the opposition to share responsibility for a deteriorating economic situation and for the unpopular reforms that would be needed to correct it. The opposition insisted on presenting political demands, such as eliminating the Workers Guards, which were an armed force in every factory, and getting party cells out of the workplace.!° After three months of difficult negotiations, on September 19, 1989, the conferees finalized an agreement to overhaul the legal system, depoliticize the army, and cut the size and competence of the Workers Guards.

On one issue, however, no agreement could be reached. The roundtable agreement, which the Hungarian Parliament enacted into law on October 20, 1989, called for a new president to be elected directly by a nationwide vote on November 26, with parliamentary elections to follow ninety days thereafter. This provision for a strong president, one with a national mandate, was a victory for the Communists, who calculated that Imre Pozsgay would be able to win a popu-

lar election, thus putting the party in a good position to dominate the parliamentary elections scheduled for 1990. Public opinion surveys indicated that this strategy could succeed. One poll taken early in November showed that 53 percent of the voting public backed Pozsgay.!!

When the parties of the center and right, led by Jézsef Antall, a historian and museum director who had quickly emerged as the leader of the Democratic Forum , did not object to this arrangement and signed the roundtable agreement, the parties of the left—the Alliance of Free Democrats and the Alliance of Young Democrats —suspected them of cutting a deal with Pozsgay. Since candidates from the Democratic Forum had won all four of the by-elections held in 1989, it had reason to hope it would win substantial representation in the new parliament and become the dominant opposition party, potentially even the partner of the reform Communists in a ruling coalition. In return for backing an electoral method that would put Pozsgay in the presidency, the Democratic Forum could hope to get the prime minister’ s portfolio. These calculations reflected the belief common in the summer 1989 that Pozsgay and the Communists would remain vital factors in Hungarian politics.

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 161

The Free Democrats and the Young Democrats refused to sign the roundtable agreement because it called for a presidential election in November.!2 The Free Democrats immediately undertook a petition campaign to force a national referendum on the question of how the president would be elected, whether by popular election or by parliament. They argued that Hungary needed a weak president, that is, one elected by parliament, because a strong president would constitute a threat to democracy. It may be assumed that they also hoped that if they could prevent Poszgay’s election in the fall of 1989, they might be successful enough in the 1990 parliamentary elections to outflank the Communists and the

Democratic Forum and to elect their own president. In little less than a month they obtained far more than the one hundred thousand signatures required to force a referendum.

Meanwhile the Communists began to streamline themselves for the open politics to which they had agreed. Grosz did his best to resist the pressure of the newly created Reform Circles Alliance, which consisted of Communist reformers from all over the country, but Grosz’s day had passed. A special party conference held early in October 1989 elected Rezs6 Nyers to replace him. When the conference then proceeded to vote overwhelmingly to drop

the word “Workers” from the party's name, turning it into the Hungarian Socialist party, unrepentant hard-liners stalked out to continue the old party under its old name. The reformers were unconcerned. They anticipated voters would reward them for shucking off their Kadarist colleagues and for turning resolutely in the direction of Western style social democracy. Hungary thus became the first country in Eastern Europe to completely abandon its old fashioned Communist party. Shortly thereafter parliament, no longer constrained by a monolithic party, changed the name of the country from the People’s Republic of Hungary to simply the Republic of Hungary, approved the changes to the constitution agreed to at the roundtable discussions, and declared that Hungary was “an indepen-

dent, democratic legal state in which the values of bourgeois democracy and democratic socialism prevail in equal measures. All power belongs to the people, which they exercise directly and through the elected representatives of popular sovereignty. 13 Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungarians had put in place the basic elements of their negotiated revolution. One important item remained: the referendum, which asked, among other things, do you favor election of the president by the national assembly?" The referendum put the Democratic Forum on the spot. It did not feel it could advocate a yes vote because that would be against the interests of its socialist allies, but it hesitated to advocate a no vote because that would be too public an endorsement of Pozsgay. Doing their best to ignore the referendum, Forum leaders called for a boycott. The Free Democrats turned this tactic against them with the effective slogan: “Who stays home, votes for the past.” In a surprise, the newly recreated Smallholders party, which later entered the government as the Forum’s coalition partner, decided to side with the Free Democrats and called for a yes vote.

162 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Perhaps the Smallholders provided the edge, because the election turned out to be very, very close. Nothing so clearly shows how suddenly democratic values had penetrated the public space in Eastern Europe, or at least how impossible it had become to ignore them, as the scrupulousness with which the votes were counted in this election, which was a disaster for the government. Out of more than four million votes cast, the yes votes favoring the election of the president by parliament prevailed by a margin of only 6,100 votes—a squeaker, but one that dashed the hopes of Imre Pozsgay and the newly minted socialists.!5 Instead of being swept into office on a wave of appreciation for bringing about the negotiated revolution, he, and everyone else, had to wait. The longer the wait, the more it sunk in that the old days were gone. By the time the parliamentary elections came in March and April 1990, the voters gave the former Communists and their collapsed Socialist party a mere 8.5 percent of the seats in the new legislature. The unrepentant hard-liners did not get any.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE BERLIN WALL By the summer of 1989 Hungarian political elites were well into making Hungary

a pluralist society. They had powerful incentives to continue the process and a quite specific reason to be sympathetic to the East German refugees. In the previous two years Hungary had taken in seventeen thousand persons fleeing Ceausescu’s regime in Transylvania, and it was anxious to put the rights and needs of these mostly Hungarian refugees in the best light. In March 1989 Hungary announced it was acceding unconditionally to the 1951 United Nations’ Convention on Refugees and the follow-up protocol of 1967.16 At approximately

the same time Prime Minister Mikl6s Németh informed Mikhail Gorbachev that the Hungarians were going to “completely remove the electronic and technological defenses” from their Austrian and Romanian borders.!”? Having thus regularized their border regime, the Hungarians could not very well claim that those fleeing Romania were true refugees and those fleeing East Germany were not. Despite many negative comments in the Federal Republic about its ship already being full, in late August West German chancellor Helmut Kohl secretly agreed to provide one billion deutschmarks to cover Hungary’s budget deficit

and on September | Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn personally flew to East Berlin to repudiate the long-standing travel agreement with the German Democratic Republic. On September 11 the public announcement came: all East Germans waiting in Hungary and any who wished to do so in the future could cross from Hungary into Austria and make for West Germany. Eleven thousand people immediately crammed themselves into buses, trains, and chugging twostroke Trabant cars and set out for arrival centers already prepared for them in West Germany. The East German regime shrilly denounced what it called an outrage against international agreements, but the Hungarians were not ruffled. One week later American President George H. W. Bush announced he was making Hungary’s most favored nation status permanent.

CHAPTER 5 The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 163

The frenzy to flee reached its climax in September when thousands of East Germans crowded into the reopened West German embassy in Prague. Climbing over walls, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the garden, almost falling out of the windows, some thirty-five hundred of them had gathered by the end of the month. Desperate to get this problem behind him so that it would not ruin the fortieth anniversary of the formation of the German Democratic Republic, which was coming up on October 7, Erich Honecker announced on September 30 that the East Germans holed up in the Prague embassy could leave on the condition that the sealed trains in which they traveled to West Germany passed through the German Democratic Republic. As they did so, the refugees would be “expelled” for “humanitarian reasons.’ When the trains passed through Dresden fulfilling this farcical technicality, police had to beat back hundreds of frantic citizens trying to jump onto the trains and escape. The only result, especially after all of East Germany saw the rapturous arrival of the immigrants on West German television, was that a few days later the Prague embassy began to fill up again. This constant desire of East Germany's most active citizens to leave the country conflicted with what some outsiders thought was the success of the country’s economy. Western analysts ranked East Germany as the tenth largest industrial power in the world. But East Germans were not convinced.!8 They could talk with the large number of West German travelers who visited the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s; they could watch West German television, which blanketed the country (except for one valley near Dresden, which therefore became known as “the valley of the clueless”); and they could see the difference in their actual money. When they compared their own scruffy currency—cheap in appearance, insubstantial in feel, and, in the case of coins, clunky in sound—with the valuable, well-printed, and solid-feeling West German deutschmarks, they received an unavoidable daily reminder of East German economic inferiority.!9 Irwin Collier likens the East German economy to the sailing industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commercial sailing ships underwent significant technological change under competition from steam-powered vessels, increasing their efficiency dramatically, but they could never match steam-powered vessels because there came a point beyond which sail technology could not go. Collier suggests that the German Democratic Republic was a dynamic system as well, one that made significant improvements, but that the inherent limitations of centralized planning and single-party domination made it just as impossible for it to compete with the market system as it proved impossible for sailing vessels to compete with steam-powered ships. He suggests there was more pathos than intended in the plea of an East German Communist party leader late in 1989 who exhorted his colleagues “to get the wind back into our... sails.”2° During the great exodus of 1989, the Western press emphasized the economic reasons for escape, as did the West Germans themselves, sometimes referring to East Germans as “banana-fresser’—a condescending and derogatory way of denigrating the animal-like eagerness with which East Germans fell upon common consumer articles when they first arrived in West Germany. But it is not a crime

164 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

to want a decent apartment or varied and nourishing food. The reason so many wanted to flee East Germany was not fundamentally economic, however. They were fleeing a stifling sense of powerlessness, the regime’s deadening insistence on capitulation, and the enervating denial of all idealism and hope. Two particularly debilitating events deepened this despair in 1989. The first was the election of May 7, 1989. Ata moment when the Soviet Union had already conducted its first open election and Poland was preparing to do so, after opposition groups had specifically advised the public on how to vote negatively, and following scattered exit polls that showed significant negative voting, Honecker’s protégé, the toothy Egon Krenz, blandly announced that 98.95 percent of the vote in that election supported the government list.2! The regime compounded the despair this absurd result produced one month later when it strongly approved of the massacre of Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, which happened on the same day of Solidarity’s amazing electoral victory in Poland. Over and over again East German television played “a Chinese documentary that praised the heroic response of the Chinese army and police to the perfidious inhumanity of the student demonstrators.”22 The regime made its point all too well. Upon arriving in West Germany in September many young refugees, 40 percent of whom were between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine, explained their flight by saying, “In East Germany there is no future,” and “Nothing will happen in that country soon. We do not feel like waiting twenty years.”23 “Do you intend to keep putting us off until doomsday?” one impassioned nineteen-year-old had asked in 1982. “What about the shining city on the hill?”24 In September and October 1989 tens of thousands of these East Germans followed the road to the shining city through Hungary. But many stayed, and it was they, not the ones who left, who toppled the Berlin Wall. The opposition groups that became active in East Germany in the 1980s were small and ineffective. In June 1989 the State Security Service, or Stasi, estimated that some one hundred and sixty groups, including pacifists, feminists, and environmentalists, existed in the GDR. In all of these only about twenty-five hundred persons were involved, of which six hundred held leadership positions. The Stasi identified only sixty persons as hard core activists.25 The environmen-

talists did not find a mobilizing issue with the mass appeal of the Nagymaros dam, and Honecker’s state itself preempted the historical discourse by a campaign in the mid-1980s that co-opted Luther, Frederick the Great, and Bach into its own pantheon of historical predecessors. But an opposition did exist, influenced by the traditional left and generally suspicious of the capitalist West. The thirty activists who gathered in East Berlin on September 10, 1989, to create the New Forum as a platform for democratic forces throughout the country, did it specifically to prevent the “wild fire” of emigration from gutting the country any further. Like the other activists of Eastern Europe ten years earlier, they chose an antipolitical name and a moderate program. The New Forum claimed it had no intention of becoming a political opposition, although some of its members dreamt of perhaps putting a slate

CHAPTER 5 e The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 165

together for the 1991 elections. It simply sought “a democratic dialogue about the tasks of the constitutional state, the economy, and of culture.”?” Although the East German courts summarily rejected their petition of registration, thousands of people signed their manifesto and the New Forum temporarily moved to center stage in the increasingly chaotic East German public life. Much more important than this first emergence of an embryonic democratic opposition were the massive public demonstrations that took place throughout East Germany in October. These were not, as Honecker would have hoped, demonstrations celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the formation of the German Democratic Republic, which took place on October 7. Of all the public celebrations that modern authoritarian states have forced on its people, none were as surrealistic as this fortieth anniversary. With his countrymen fleeing by the tens of thousands, the question of German unification peeking out from behind the rostrum, and political opposition swelling, the ailing Honecker paraded around East Berlin with a Soviet leader who privately considered him a “scumbag” and publicly told him “life punishes those who come too late.”28 The real demonstrations, the ones that brought Honecker and his state down, grew out of a traditional peace service that had been held before small gatherings

in the St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig on Monday afternoons since 1982. There had been arrests in Leipzig in 1988 and early in 1989, but just at the time the Hungarians opened their borders and the New Forum was coming into being, the character of these Monday afternoon prayers for peace changed. On September 4 some fifteen hundred persons gathered after the prayers, some of them demanding the right to leave East Germany but many for the first time chanting “We are staying.’2? When a similar gathering took place the next Monday the police arrested fifty persons, but with little effect. On Monday, September 25, eight thousand persons gathered to walk through the center of Leipzig, and on October 2, ten thousand persons marched, shouting “Were staying here,” singing “We Shall Overcome,’ as well as the “International,” and chanting slogans such as “Legalize New Forum” and “Gorby, Gorby.”2°

During Gorbachev's visit, which took place on October 7 and 8, security police responded to protesters who demonstrated against the fortieth anniversary celebrations in many towns and cities throughout the country in the traditional manner, breaking heads and making arrests. “Give those pigs a sound beating,’ the head of the security policy is alleged to have said.3! What would the authorities do on October 9 at the next Monday demonstration in Leipzig? It was rumored that Honecker had signed Secret Order Number 8/89 directing all security agencies, including the army, to prevent hostile actions and provocations by any means.32 On October 5 Erich Mielke, head of the German state security service, “sent an ‘extremely urgent’ directive to all Stasi branches ordering them to take “decisive action to smash inimical enemy activities.” 33 Two days later, Berlin police beat and arrested demonstrators in Berlin, and the next day a large dem-

onstration was answered with arrests and beatings. Authorities gathered three thousand military riot policemen, five hundred militia men, and three thousand

166 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

armed regular army troops in and near Leipzig to support the local police. But instructions from Berlin were vague, directing only that order should be maintained. Local leaders were to act only in case of violence, and even then on their own judgment, thus opening the door to second guessing from the center.34 Nevertheless, the signs were ominous. Fearing a Chinese solution, Kurt Masur, the director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and one of Leipzig’s most respected citizens, brought together five other prominent persons, including three district party leaders, and worked out an appeal for peaceful dialogue.35 “We all need a free exchange of opinions about the development of socialism in our country,” the appeal read in part. “We ask you earnestly for prudence so that a peaceful dialogue will become possible.”3* When the church opened for the usual five oclock service and loudspeakers boomed out Peter Zimmerman’s voice reading the appeal to the nervous and even frightened crowd, the security services, still without orders, confused as to their role, and seeing no violence, opened the barriers and fifty thousand suddenly joyous people peacefully marched through Leipzig chanting, among other things, “We are the people.”37 The Leipzig demonstration of October 9 was the crucial moment when the

Socialist Unity party lost control of East Germany. Convinced now that they were free to vent their frustrations in public, crowds began gathering regularly in towns throughout East Germany. Tens of thousands gathered in provincial cities and the by-now traditional Monday night marches in Leipzig grew to seventy thousand, then to over one hundred thousand, and then to three hundred thousand. The most spectacular of the marches came in East Berlin on November 4. At least half a million Berliners thronged the streets carrying banners with all manner of slogans, ranging from the historical (“1789-1989”) through the light-

hearted (“I want to visit my girlfriend in Holland”) to the bitter (“Stop privileges”). Most significantly, the crowd changed its chant from “We are the people” to “We are one people,” indicating that as far as they were concerned not just the party but the entire country should be thrown on the garbage heap of history. The situation had passed beyond crisis. This was revolution, and not by an

opposition party—the brand new and still weak New Forum was being pulled along by events—but by an entire people. When the Leipzig crowds chanted “We are the people,” they did not have to add “And you are not.” Even the most blinkered party member got the message. But having adamantly resisted any change for years, the best the party could come up with was to replace the aging Honecker, who stepped down on October 18. Egon Krenz, hitherto known as a hard-line, unimaginative bureaucrat, took his place. Smiling broadly at all times, Krenz did his best. In a frantic forty-four days in office he fired Stalinists, visited Gorbachev (who gave him scant support, telling him that pluralism of opinion was a good thing), reshuffled both the Council of Ministers and his politburo, opened the Czech border, and generally beat a rapid retreat in a disorderly effort to stave off complete collapse. The climactic moment came on the evening of November 9.38 Earlier that day, responding to the overwhelming pressure to come up with more open travel

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 167

regulations, the council of ministers passed on to party leader Egon Krenz a draft of a new policy.3? Krenz pushed it through the central committee, which was in session, and then passed it on to Gunter Schabowski, the party's press spokesman, with the comment “This could be a hit.” This casual act proved to be, as Krenz said later, a “slight mistake.”40 At the seven o'clock press conference that evening, Schabowski droned through routine information about the central committee meeting and ended by reading the new travel rules. These included the words: “Applications by private individuals for travel abroad can now be made without the previously existing requirements.... Permanent exits are possible via all GDR border crossings to the FRG and (West) Berlin.” The reporters’ interest immediately perked up. When did these new rules go into effect, one of them asked? Not entirely sure himself, Schabowski improvised: “Immediately, without delay.” In the muddled moments that followed Schabowski added, “Permanent exit can take place via all border crossings, from the GDR to the FRG, and West Berlin respectively.”42 Despite restrained television reporting of this exchange, the rumor began to spread in the streets that a momentous decision had been made, and crowds began to gather at various checkpoints along the Wall. The border guards, uninformed about any change in the rules and unable to raise any of the leadership by phone despite repeated attempts, began to be influenced by the rumors. When the pressure of the crowds increased, their officers simply decided to give in and to let people through to the other side. By midnight hundreds of thousands of ecstatic people were pouring through the Wall and a delirious celebration, joined in by both Ossies and Wessies, as the East and West Germans referred to each other, engulfed the suddenly reunited city. The exhilaration generated by the fall of the Berlin Wall—for in a matter of hours people were chipping away at it and in a matter of days and weeks it was being dismantled—is beyond description. In that one night the entire picture of Europe constructed in the minds of almost all of its citizens for forty years underwent an irreversible phase shift. Every situation seems semipermanent to those who are living through it, and the postwar settlement, which was always implicit rather than explicit—no treaty formally ended World War II with Germany—was no exception. Despite the rhetoric over the years about the desirability of German unification or the injustice suffered by the peoples of Eastern Europe under Communist rule, the cost of actually changing the relationships established in the first few years after the war was always too high. No one who had experienced World War II could feel really comfortable with the idea of a united Germany, especially since West Germany had become the most power-

ful country in Europe. Each time a serious confrontation occurred in Eastern Europe the West wisely decided that it was not worth risking World War III to intervene. But with the sharp crack of champagne bottles spraying corks on all sides of the Wall, on the night of November 9-10 the unification of Germany suddenly seemed not only possible but likely, and the future of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe suddenly seemed very bleak indeed.

168 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

ZHIVKOV’S FALL IN BULGARIA Almost unnoticed in the euphoric hangover on November 10 was the announcement that Todor Zhivkov, leader of Bulgaria since 1954, had resigned under pressure to be replaced by long-time Foreign Minister Petttr Mladenov. Zhivkov's departure had no direct relationship to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it was part

and parcel of the reform momentum that the Polish and Hungarian developments had evoked even in the farthest reaches of Eastern Europe. In the early and mid-1980s Bulgaria became infamous in the West for being Eastern Europe’s most notorious venue for real-life spy stories. In the late 1970s Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian oppositionist who had ridiculed Zhivkov as a man with “a distastefully mediocre sense of humor” and the bullying manner of “a village policeman,’ died in London when someone injected him in the leg with

a poison pellet shot through an umbrella point. Bulgarian authorities denied responsibility but in fact they masterminded Markov’ss assassination, along with that of several other émigré critics, with the help of the KGB43 Then the trial of a Turkish dissident who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II hinted that the Bulgarian secret police had fronted for the KGB in that plot and revealed that sleepy Sofia had become the home base of a number of arms smugglers and dope runners, all probably in collusion with the authorities.“4 Corruption was not alien to Todor Zhivkov’s regime but probably did not go as far as plotting to kill the pope. Just about the time of the attempt on the pope’s life in 1981, Zhivkov reached the peak of his success.45 Despite the oil price disasters of the 1970s, Bulgaria had succeeded in lowering its external debt to a sustainable $1.8 billion (mid-1983 figure). By adopting the Motorola family of microchips instead of the Intel family adopted by the rest of CMEA (Council of Mutual Economic Assistance—the East European answer to the European

Economic Community) and by entering into a number of cooperative agreements with Hitachi and Toshiba, the Bulgarians created a successful computer industry, carving out a niche for themselves at the high end of the East European user spectrum. Since the Soviet space program used Bulgarian computers, the value of computer exports to the Soviet Union rose substantially in the 1980s.‘ Zhivkov had great faith in science and technology, but he also understood the difference between talking about a technological revolution, which kept him in a position of control, and actually producing one, which might threaten his position by creating economic pressure for political change.*” Purposefully ineffective reform was the hallmark of Zhivkov’s Bulgaria in the 1980s. When in 1982 he introduced a plan he called the New Economic Mechanism, perhaps hoping some of the Hungarian successes would rub off on Bulgaria, he spoke at length about the scientific-technological revolution as the key to Bulgarian progress, sounding very much like Walter Ulbricht in the 1960s. At the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1986 he emphasized again that the “further development of socialist society would depend on the scientific-technological revolution.”48 Presenting himself as a reformer pushing for modern methods who was at the same time

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 169

sensitive to changing winds in the Communist world, he had no difficulty in responding to Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost with Bulgarian equivalents: pereustroistvo— the work of the party, the work of the people,” as he put it early in 1988—and glasnost, limited however by the principle that openness could never be used as a “subjective mirror of those...not on the right track.”49 Never breaking stride, he announced again, as countless party documents had in the past, that he would increase the degree of economic self-management, eliminate distortions and deformations, and guarantee the professionalism of party cadres at all levels.5°

These familiar pronouncements did not work because they were not supposed to work. Out of ideas, Zhivkov clung tenaciously to personal power and to the rhetoric with which he had justified it for thirty years. As the price of Soviet oil rose in the 1980s and Bulgaria could no longer achieve a positive balance of trade by reselling cheap Soviet oil at world prices, Zhivkov turned to the inevitable remedy: borrowing. By 1989 Bulgarian debt had ballooned to over $10 billion and the country’s economy was in a downward spiral.

In 1984 and 1985 Zhivkov suddenly disrupted the Bulgarian social fabric by initiating a brutal assimilation campaign against the ethnic Turks living in Bulgaria. Comprising close to a million persons and constituting about 10 percent of the Bulgarian population, these Turks were not an unassimilated and indigestible mass of foreign peoples. They lived mainly in two rural areas, where their ancestors had resided for centuries, and were Islamic in custom, if not always practicing their faith punctiliously. Most of them spoke Bulgarian as well as Turkish, and the educated among them were often quite assimilated to Bulgarian culture. They had been living at peace with their neighbors for several generations and were among Bulgaria’s most industrious and efficient agricultural producers. Bulgarian policy toward minorities had been intolerant since 1956, when Zhivkov began to put his stamp on Bulgarian politics.5! Zhivkov did not insist

on the same level of absurd personal identification with the national past as Ceausescu did in Romania, but the elaborate celebration of the thirteen hundredth anniversary of the founding of the medieval Bulgarian state and an exclusive focus on the Bulgarian past in the history department of Sofia University confirm that Zhivkov relied heavily on nationalist forms of legitimation. The

presumption of this worldview was that everyone who lived in Bulgaria was really Bulgarian.

The first decision reflecting this view was to stop counting Macedonians separately in the census. The 1956 census had counted almost one hundred ninety thousand Macedonians living in Bulgaria, but in the 1960 edition of the same census the table listing population by nationalities was omitted, never to return.>2 Next, over a period of years, the regime forced Bulgarian-speaking Muslims, called Pomaks, to change their names to more Slavic-sounding ones.*? This campaign reflected the parochial orientalism characteristic of Bulgarian nationalism. Asserting that Islam is an obscurantist faith that stands in the way

170 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

of modernization, officials cited the economic progress of the Pomaks in western Bulgaria since 1960 as proof that the assimilation policy had been correct. Bulgarian academics added to the arguments by suggesting that both Pomaks and Turks were really Bulgarians who had been forcibly converted during the Ottoman period and were only now returning to their true national heritage. The final push was Zhivkov’s turn against the largest “backward” minority, the Turks, perhaps because after thirty years he felt it was time to have the census scheduled for 1985 show only Bulgarians living in Bulgaria. The campaign for the reconstruction of names, as Bulgarian officials called it, was conducted secretly and in the absence of foreign observers. After it was over the government announced that a spontaneous ground swell of pride in Bulgaria

had swept the countryside. All Bulgarians with Turkic- and Arabic-sounding names had voluntarily and willingly registered new, authentically Bulgarian names with the authorities.54 In fact, many Turks vigorously resisted the name changes and the Bulgarian army intervened. Stories of people crushed by tanks began filtering out of the Turkish regions, and international human rights organizations reported that the reconstruction of names had cost approximately one hundred lives. Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov is said to have remarked privately that it was necessary to finish with the Turkish question by “flame and sword” once and for all.59

For four years the Bulgarian government stonewalled negative international reaction to its minorities policy, particularly ridiculing the “hypocritical tears’ and “nationalist propaganda” coming from Turkey. In May 1989, however, a group of Bulgarian Turks calling themselves the Democratic League for the Defense of Human Rights began a series of hunger strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations against the persistent pressure by the government to eliminate and transform their cultural and religious customs, including the right to use Turkish in elementary schools. Suddenly Zhivkov, perhaps overly defensive at his

weakening political position, turned angry. Turkish families were told to pack their belongings and leave, often on only a few hours notice. From May into July authorities forced some three hundred thousand persons to leave Bulgaria literally overnight, taking with them only what they could carry or cram into their small cars. Even though more than half of these unwilling refugees returned to Bulgaria within a year, the damage both to ethnic relations and to the Bulgarian economy was incalculable. One of the reasons that 1990 was a bad year economi-

cally for Bulgaria was that a significant portion of its most productive citizens were sitting in Turkish refugee camps. Many among the Bulgarian intelligentsia found the reconstruction of names a distasteful tragedy and today blame Zhivkov for poisoning ethnic relations, but until mid-1989 very few spoke in public against it. Early in 1987 six longtime activists sent a letter to a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) protesting human rights abuses in Bulgaria but to little effect, except to cause their own exile. One year later, associates of those who had writ-

ten the CSCE formed the Independent Association for the Defense of Human

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 171

Rights; but, since it was perceived as being pro-Turkish, it did not have a widespread impact. The mainstream of Bulgarian opposition emerged over a different issue, the environment. In April 1987 the journal Literaturen Front (Literary Front) publicly mentioned the problem of air pollution in Sofia for the first time. That fall the same journal reported that a few people had gathered in Ruse to demand that the Romanian chemical plant across the Danube River in Giurgiu stop its constant and excessive emanations of chlorine gas.** “Give us fresh air,” the demonstrators cried. In December 1987 and January 1988 activists in Ruse staged an exhibition, combining drawings and paintings of ecological decline with dreadful data on the environmental situation in the city, in which all the vital statistics were in decline. The emboldened Ruse activists then produced a short film called Dishe (Breathe), which they showed in Sofia to groups totaling perhaps two thousand intellectuals. Concurrently with these initiatives a four-part series in Trud (Labor) chronicled the corrupt practices of a certain Mihaylov family in the small town of Etropole. The sensitive issue in the articles, although they did not mention it directly, was the knowledge that the Mihaylov family was linked with Zhivkov's son Vladimir. The prospect that future articles might reveal deeply corrupt practices at the very top of the Bulgarian leadership was obviously what Zhivkov meant by “subjective mirrors of people on the wrong track,” and he reacted strongly. The editor of Literaturen Front was fired, and for good measure three or four party members, including the wife of the speaker of the national assembly, were expelled for signing the environmental appeal of the Ruse group. Zhivkov announced an offensive against the intelligentsia, calling a central committee plenum for May 1988 for the purpose of “restructuring intellectual life.” Zhivkov was not able to make good his demand for a plenum in May because an internal party fight suddenly surfaced. Zhivkov had always claimed that he was the first to try perestroika in the 1960s but that 1968 had shown its failings. In the 1980s he continued to maintain that Bulgaria had been the first country to reform and that reforms were going further there than anywhere else. By 1987 and 1988 this claim was wearing thin. In 1988 Stoyan Mikhailov began to argue in party circles that Zhivkov’s reforms were not original at all and that those in the Soviet Union had gone much further and deeper. The fight was bitter— supposedly Zhivkov even wrote letters of resignation—but without any agreed upon method for succession party critics were not yet able to oust the wily leader. When the plenum finally took place in July, Zhivkov was able to force Mikhailov out, along with Chudomir Aleksandroyv, heir apparent and a frequent critic of the slowness of pereustroistvo. During his long career Zhivkov had faced and defeated many challengers. The ouster of Mikhailov and Aleksandrov was another one of these moments. But at this same plenum, during which he once again emerged victorious, the first conversations took place among members of a faction that finally, after so many others had failed, forced Zhivkov to resign. A contentious issue in the politburo

172 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

during the last years of the regime was agricultural policy. Some members of the politburo had come to the conclusion during the 1980s that a system in which an efficient cooperative was penalized by being made to turn over its surplus to the state while an inefficient one was rewarded with subsidies was never going to work properly. These individuals were not reformers in the Hungarian sense but simply a few persons who wanted to give the peasants more control of the land

and its produce while otherwise maintaining the system. After discussions of this issue became so heated in the politburo that they turn into shouting matches, the realization that Zhivkov would never accede to real changes led to the first conversations among those who finally found a way to replace him.°”

In trouble with an as yet entirely informal and behind-the-scenes reform faction, by 1989 Zhivkov no longer had the support of a significant portion of the intelligentsia either. For more than thirty years he had successfully cultivated the Bulgarian intellectuals. In 1988 he lost them. No group in Eastern Europe was more aware of the progress of reform in the Soviet Union than was the Sofia intelligentsia. Many educated Bulgarians speak Russian, and all can read it; there is a Russian language high school in Sofia; and since the late 1970s the city even had a separate television channel broadcasting in Russian. By 1987, for the first time in postwar Eastern Europe, Soviet newspapers began to sell out in Bulgaria on hot news days. Aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union, frustrated by the obvious falsity of its own government's mouthing of glasnost, and agitated by minor repressions against editors, professors, and students, the Sofia intelligentsia began to create a belated democratic opposition. The first rumblings emanated from Sofia University late in 1987 when four persons, three of them old-line Communists, were expelled from the party for criticizing Zhivkov at a meeting of faculty party members.58 The case created a stir among the faculty, many of whom began discussing how to defend the rights of the expelled. In March some of these faculty made contact with the Ruse environmentalists. These initiatives led in the fall of 1988 to the creation of the Club for the Support of Perestroika and Glasnost, an “unofficial association of individuals” formed by about one hundred faculty members in an antipolitical spirit. Prominent members included the philosopher Zhelyu Zhelev, the respected and formerly sanctioned poet Blaga Dimitrova, and the Hot Peppers collaborators, Radoi Rolin and Boris Dimovski. The government reacted to the formation of this club with near panic, calling its members “disinformants,” “traitors,” “extremists, and “anti-Bulgarian,” but opposition among the intelligentsia continued to grow. By March 1989 it was said that nine opposition movements existed, including a new independent labor

union, Podkrepa, and the heir of the Ruse group, Ecoglasnost. When in 1989 Zhivkov began expelling Turks, the intelligentsia did not keep their concerns to themselves as they had in 1984-1985. On July 4, 1989, 121 persons, including the most prominent members of the Club for the Support of Perestroika and Glasnost, sent an appeal to the national assembly calling the government’s expulsion of the Turks “contrary to our national character, humiliating for our

CHAPTER 5 The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 173

national dignity, and disruptive of our tradition of tolerance.” On August | they sent an even tougher statement.°*? For the first time in his regime, Zhivkov could no longer count on the intel-

ligentsia to remain silent. In October 1989, Ecoglasnost, which had expanded its program to include opposition to a hydroelectric project near famous Rila monastery and other similar issues, embarrassed the regime by holding a public demonstration during an international conference on the environment that was being held in Sofia. The police responded with some arrests and detentions, provoking international protests. On November 4, the same day as the massive demonstration in East Berlin, Ecoglasnost was able to respond by assembling four thousand people outside the national assembly to demand democratic reforms. In the end it was not these oppositional activities—although they were by far the most extensive Bulgaria had experienced since World War I]—that brought Zhivkov down.°° Former Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov states that the effort to replace Zhivkov began in the summer of 1989, when Atanasov, Pettir Mladenov,

Andrei Lukhanov and General Dobri Dzhurov began to discuss the possibility at the annual féte for the diplomatic community held in Smolyan. Mladenov had been minister of foreign affairs since 1971 and was frustrated because he felt Zhivkov was not sympathetic to the opening toward the West that Mladenov believed necessary. Lukhanov was an intellectual Communist who still believed that it would be possible to create a social democratic party that could introduce reforms without giving up the party’s primary role. Dzhurov, the minister of defense, was an old partisan colleague of Zhivkov’s who was not afraid to talk back to the party leader. All of them were frustrated not only at Zhivkov’s unwill-

ingness to move with the times but with the promotion of his son Vladimir to the central committee position in charge of culture. For some time Dzhurov in particular had opposed the influence of Zhivkov family members, and Zhivkov's efforts to win him over with appointments benefiting Dzhurov’s own family had failed. The conspirators wanted to make sure they had Soviet approval, but feared a

direct contact would tip Zhivkov off.6! Mladenov found a way around this at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bucharest in July by asking Gorbachev to autograph a copy of Perestroika for his niece. When Gorbachev went over to a window sill to sign, Mladenov, in full view of Zhivkov but out of his hearing, said, “We are determined to carry out a change in Bulgaria.” When Gorbachev responded, “We sympathize with you, but it’s your business,’ Mladenov and the others interpreted it as a green light to go ahead. Late in October Lukhanov took what he called “a calculated risk” by speaking more or less openly to a few colleagues in the politburo. At the same time, Mladenov also took a chance. He had been working hard to advance Bulgaria’s application to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later the World Trade Organization) and to widen other similarly needed openings to the West. Greatly irritated by an order from Zhivkov to rebuff the American ambassador, who had been encouraging the democratic opposition, Mladenov

174. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

sent Zhivkov a letter of resignation. In surprisingly vigorous language Mladenov accused the Bulgarian leader of dragging the country down into “the same pigs’ trough as the rotten dictatorial family regime of Ceausescu.”©? Zhivkov brought the letter to the politburo, where it received agitated discussion, but he decided to forgive Mladenov and not to accept his resignation. During the week before the November 10 meeting of the central committee, when the plotters had resolved to take Zhivkov down, Lukhanov and others began speaking to Zhivkov in general terms about resigning. On November 8, a three-person delegation directly asked him to step down. Meanwhile, the Soviet-trained Dzhurov moved four loyal army units into Sofia to insure that the change would go smoothly. Zhivkov hoped that Moscow might rescue him, but Gorbachev refused his request to visit Moscow for consultations. At the politburo meeting of November 9, he faced a clear majority against him, a majority that controlled the army. When he got up at the central committee meeting the following day to announce his resignation, it seemed to those present that he did so willingly. Mladenov, the most presentable of the main plotters, stepped into his place as head of the party.*4 The streets greeted Mladenov’s accession with joy. Over the next year the center of Sofia became a huge debating society, full of street corner discussions, intense meetings, and exuberant rallies. Mladenov responded in a manner that can only be described as amazing for a man who had been at the center of singleparty Communist power for almost twenty years. He announced that Bulgaria had to become a modern, democratic, and pluralist state and countered the skepticism these promises evoked by reinstating all dismissed party members and expelling Zhivkov from the party, renouncing the party's leading role in society, permitting widespread freedom of speech calling for free elections for the spring of 1990, and by the end of December 1989, agreeing to the by-now traditional East European transition device—roundtable discussions with the opposition.® On its side, the opposition, which now consisted of nine major organizations and dozens of miraculous flowers that had sprung from the hitherto barren Bulgarian soil, had already come together under the leadership of Ecoglasnost and Podkrepa to form the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). Bulgarians jumped with alacrity on the bandwagon that was heading, they hoped, to Europe.

THE VELVET REVOLUTION One country that had not jumped on the bandwagon, at least by the time the Berlin Wall fell and Zhivkov left power, was Czechoslovakia. This once prosperous democracy had been in what Charter 77 activists called “a death-like torpor” since 1968.66 The Husak/B ilak team changed its tune very little from the time it fully consolidated its power in the early 1970s until December 1987, when Husak

stepped down as party leader (he stayed as president) in favor of Milos Jakes, and Jan Fojtik pushed aside B’ilak as chief ideological watchdog. Czechoslovakia was not in the same kind of acute economic difficulty as were the other states of

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 175

East Europe. Husak had isolated his country from the world economy, increasing trade with the other socialist countries to almost 80 percent of total foreign

trade. Whatever long-term harm this parochialism did to the Czechoslovak economy, it had the advantage of lessening the necessity for Czechoslovakia to borrow in the West.°7 During the 1980s Czechoslovak foreign debt was the lowest in Eastern Europe, remaining at the manageable figure of between $3 and $4 billion. Czechoslovak planners, despite their lack of interest in private farming or alternative forms of cooperative property, managed to keep relatively plentiful supplies of food in the stores, even meat. In 1989 one of the arguments the regime used to defuse public dissatisfaction was to compare the Czechoslovak standard of living to that of Poland, where long lines for simple groceries were commonplace. And yet the economy was not vigorous. Growth had dropped off dramatically in the early 1980s and had not recovered. Even Husak had to admit that some changes were necessary, but when they were introduced in 1987, the year Gorbachev visited Prague to shouts of “Gorby, Gorby,” they were modest even by the standards of the 1960s. When Jakes came to power he loyally proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s interest in prestavba, the Czech word for perestroika, but in fact very little changed. As in East Germany, however, it was not economic disappointments that pushed the Communists aside but massive gatherings of hundreds of thousands of citizens on an almost daily basis. When this happened in East Germany no clearly identified new leaders existed. In Czechoslovakia obvious and natural leaders were available for the transition to democracy: the veteran members of Charter 77 who had been keeping the antipolitical flame of democratic hope flickering for more than a decade. Charter 77 was never a large movement. Constant harassment had kept its membership down to that small number of people who were willing to “live in truth” no matter what the consequences: a few thousand people at the fringes, a few hundred near the center, a few dozen real leaders, and one at the very center— Vaclav Havel. There have been few figures in European politics quite like this man. A writer by birth, a philosopher by inclination, a playwright by profession, and a moralist by conviction, under ordinary circumstances Havel would never have been a politician, let alone president of his country. He would be a philosopher, writing, as he did during his longest prison stay, about “the mysterious multiformity and infinite ‘elusiveness’ of the order of Being, which...simply cannot be grasped and described by a consistent system of knowledge,’®8 or he would be enriching the theater of the absurd with a family of plays about “the basic modalities of humanity in a state of collapse.”* Even under the special circumstances of growing up in a revolutionizing state, he had no inclination to be a politician. He was a writer whose mission was “to speak the truth about the world I live in, to bear witness to its terrors and its miseries—in other words, to warn rather than hand out prescriptions for change.’7° The pudgy and unathletic son of a successful Prague businessman, Havel felt an outsider even as a child because of the privileges his family gave him.7! When

176 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the Communists came to power his class origins made his outsider status official. The regime seized his father’s property in 1948 (it was returned in 1991) and Havel had to take a job as a laboratory assistant rather than entering high school, although he did eventually receive a high school diploma after several grueling years of night school. After some desultory studies of public transport and a difficult two-year stint in the army, he began to work as a stagehand in Prague’s ABC Theater, from which point he found his voice as a playwright. During the 1960s he produced some of his best-known plays at the Theater on the Balustrade.

There was never any question in Havel’s mind that he was a writer. From the time he first learned the alphabet he wrote and associated with people who wrote. At fifteen he formed his first intellectual group, which put out its own typewritten magazine, and by twenty he had already raised his voice at the Second Congress of the Writers’ Union of Czechoslovakia to call party reformers hypocrites when they said they wanted to open windows to truth and yet refused to listen to those who sought to tell the truth. From that point on, driven to investigate the human condition and to live his life in accordance with what he found, Havel simply went from one logical decision to another, writing down his thoughts in a powerful and effective prose as he went, often stopping to drink a beer or to watch a play with his friends. They never sat down and decided to be oppositionists, he said in 1978, but had “simply done certain things which we had to do or which seemed to us to be proper.””2“When a person behaves in keep-

ing with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, and when he tries to behave as a citizen even under conditions where citizenship is degraded,” he said on December 7, 1989, the day he agreed to stand for president of Czechoslovakia, “it may not lead to anything, yet it might. But what surely will not lead to anything is when a person calculates whether it will lead to something or not.”73 As his onetime antagonist, novelist Milan Kundera, has said, Havel’s life was “one

gradual, continuous process, and it gives the impression of a perfect compositional unity.” Havel’s life is that rare case, Kundera said, “where comparing a life to a work of art is justified.””4 The clarity and moral attractiveness of Havel’s views, which he expressed in such powerful essays as “Letter to Dr. Gustav Husak” and “The Power of the Powerless,” identified Havel as the most eloquent of the East European antipoliticians, not only to observant Westerners and aspiring oppositionists but to the Husak/B’ilak regime as well. The authorities countered Charter 77 with harass-

ment, house arrests, preventative detainment, forced exile, and specific programs they called Izolace (Isolation) and Asanace (Decontamination).75 Some of the harassed reacted with insouciance, as did Ludvik Vaculik, who describes his interrogations with a light but devastating touch in A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator.” But special attention was reserved for Havel and the other Charter 77 spokespersons. In 1979, despite indignant protests from abroad, a Czechoslovak court sentenced Havel and five prominent activists, all of whom, ironically, were also members of a group called the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (Vybor na obranu nespravedlive stihanych—VONS), to

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 177

lengthy jail sentences. Havel was released in March 1983 only when he contracted pneumonia after having spent almost four years at exhausting hard labor.”

Charter 77 was not an organization, although it had its organizers abroad, and it was not even a movement, although some used that term. It was a group of people with a wide range of viewpoints united by a moral attitude. “We were crazy, impractical madmen and adventurers who voluntarily gave our names and addresses to State Security,’ said Miroslav Kusy, one of the few Slovak activists.78 Havel’s ability to express the moral dimension of living in truth was what made him the natural leader of an inherently leaderless initiative. The ability to overlook programmatic differences and to unite in their effort to live the truth made Charter 77 what Petr Uhl, a Trotskyite sentenced to five years in the 1979 trial, called “a school for diversity.””? Another of those convicted in 1979, and given three years, was Vaclav Benda, a practicing Catholic who believed that one had go beyond the abstract ideal of ethical choice and make a true community possible by creating a “parallel polis.”8° In their personal lives, Benda said, people should attempt to establish independent structures in areas such as education, culture, and information. The differences among these three men, one a Trotskyite, another a Catholic, and the third a nonpolitical philosopher/artist, suggest that Charter 77's strength

lay not in a specific ideology but rather in its moral conviction. Charter 77 brought together people of diverse views who could agree on one overriding point: the regime was false. This belief, as well as a sense that overt political opposition would be pointless in the face of repression backed by Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, permitted them to subsume their differences under the general umbrella of Charter 77’s focus on human rights and to accept the admonition to live in truth. Appealing as this adage was to foreigners contemplating it from the comfort of their libraries, it was too rarified in theory and too difficult in practice to overcome the desire of the vast majority of Czechoslovaks, including even most intellectuals to live a normal life. Living in truth was Charter 77’s greatest strength because the regime was powerless against it, but it was also its greatest weakness because such a life was far too difficult for most people. Why do the people not protest the obvious and daily injustices they suffer, Havel asked in his letter to Husak? Because, he answered in “The Power of the Powerless,” if they do not conform the regime will “spew them from its mouth.” Havel, Uhl, Benda, and others were willing to be spewed, but most people understandably were not. Charter 77 had a limited response in Slovakia.*! There the important issue remained a lurking Slovak nationalism that in the twentieth century had become closely linked with Catholicism. Religious practice remained stronger in Slovakia, where 70 percent of the people baptized their children in 1984, than it did in the Czech lands, where only 30 percent did so.82 The connection between religion and nationality in the Czech mind, even though 40 percent of Czechs consider themselves Catholic, is primarily with the Protestant movement of Jan Hus and

178 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the cosmopolitan morality of the Bohemian Brethren of the fifteenth century. The decline of religiosity among the Czechs was amply demonstrated in 1989 at one of the great street meetings. When a dissident priest tried to lead the crowd in singing the old Czech Wenceslas hymn, “most of crowd either [did] not know the words or [were] reluctant to sing them.”®3 Neither the Catholic church nor the minority Protestant faiths, which constituted about 10 percent of the population,

was able to provide the sort of succor to the Czech opposition that the Polish Catholic church provided to Solidarity or that the Evangelical (Lutheran) church did to the East German peace movements. In the 1980s, however, when the regime increased its pressure on the church in response to the dual threats it felt emanating from Poland and from a revivified papacy under John Paul II, a backlash developed among Catholics. Cardinal Franti$ek Tomasek, who is Czech and who remained vigorous despite being in his eighties, took his lead from Rome and began, as he had not under previous

popes, to speak out. In 1985 he invited John Paul II to the celebrations of the eleven hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius who, with Saint Cyril, brought Christianity to the Slavs. When the authorities refused permission for the visit, more than one hundred thousand Czechs and Slovaks turned up at the ceremony at Velehrad anyway.* Later that year TomaSek responded to crude attacks on him in the party press with an open letter in which he said, “The church here is not the center of political opposition. All it wishes to do is carry on its pastoral and missionary work.... Talking of peace and disarmament would only become relevant and effective when justice and respect for human rights prevail.”85 Then in the spring of 1987 the church announced a “Decade of Spiritual Renewal.” Late in 1987 a group of Moravian Catholics began circulat-

ing a thirty-one-point petition calling for the separation of church and state and for freedom of religion in general. When Cardinal Tomasek appealed to Catholics to sign this petition, saying that “cowardice and fear are unworthy of a true Christian,’ the phenomenal number of six hundred thousand persons, a majority of whom were Slovaks, signed within six months.’ Organizing such a massive endeavor, and planning for the needs for food and sanitation of a large number of pilgrims, gave organizers precious experience in self-activization outside of state structures. This unintended consequence of Catholic activism was the main instance of a broad civil society developing among the Czechs and Slovaks.

Opposition in Czechoslovakia, then, headed in two not necessarily compatible directions during the 1980s. The first was the elegant and highly ethical community of mostly secular intellectuals, primarily Czech, who attracted considerable sympathetic attention in the West. Many Czechs had heard of Havel and of Charter 77, primarily through foreign radio services and attacks in the controlled media, but the movement’s antipolitical message provoked no mass response.’” Slovakia, on the other hand, had only a few Charter 77 activists and

little of the creative and artistic ferment that was characteristic of Czech culture. But in Slovakia hundreds of thousands of people took part in pilgrimages

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 179

and risked signing a petition the government wanted to suppress, a petition that sought freedom, but under the aegis of the Catholic church.

In 1988, the hitherto antipolitical opposition in Prague began to turn to active political confrontation. A regular underground newspaper, Lidové noviny (People’s News), began appearing in January 1988, and about the same time Petr Uhl, Jan Urban, and others established the East European Information Agency. Sections of the agency in Hungary, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia exchanged news and disseminated it to Western agencies such as Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and the BBC. In October a group calling itself the Movement for Civil Liberties announced its manifesto, the first sentence of which read, “The time has come to get involved in politics.”88 Praising the antipolitical work of Charter 77, the signatories argued that the time had come for concrete work to create “Democracy for Everyone,’ which was the title of their manifesto. In 1988 Czech activists were putting their cards on the table, as Havel phrased it, moving from the advocacy of human rights into political activism, even though they knew this would mean confrontation with the government. “We need to fill up the jails,” Jan Urban said.°8° But as Havel also said, the regime was putting its cards on the table too. Prague

party boss Miroslav Stép4n summed up the government’s view in December 1988 as he personally supervised the spraying of demonstrators with water hoses on Human Rights day: “There will be no dialogue.’% Party leader Milos Jakes claimed that Czechoslovakia supported Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost, and this may well have been one of the reasons many observers noted an increased willingness of Czech citizens to speak out in 1988. On the other hand, Jake’ got rid of Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal, who had been considered a moderating influence in the Husak/B’ilak years. JakeS’s new cadre was younger and less experienced than its predecessors, and its policies were more conflicted. The government permitted Alexander Dub¢ek, the hero of 1968, to receive an honorary degree in Bologna, for example, and allowed somewhat more leeway in the kinds of plays produced. But it also rounded up oppositionists in preventative detention at every potentially tense moment. Whether these hesitant and poorly executed policies were an effort to introduce a Jaruzelskian dual strategy of carrot and stick or whether they were simply a result of incompetence is unimportant. They were too little and too inept, only convincing Timothy Garton Ash that the regime was exhibiting the fatal vacillations of an ancient regime in its last years. In November 1988 he predicted the Jakes regime would not last another ten years—and probably many fewer.”! The revolutionary year of 1989 started in Czechoslovakia on a familiar note: the arrest and imprisonment of Vaclav Havel. One of the martyrs of the Prague Spring had been a young student named Jan Palach who had shocked the world by burning himself to death in Wenceslas Square on January 16, 1969. Palach was not the only one to attempt this sacrificial act, but his name became one of the symbolic rallying points of democratic initiatives throughout Eastern Europe. The Independent Association for the Defense of Human Rights in Bulgaria chose

180 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

January 16, 1988, to announce its creation, for example, and when Jan Kavan established a publishing house in London to circulate Charter 77 writings abroad, he called it Palach Press. On January 15, 1989, some four thousand persons defied a government ban and attempted to gather at the place of Palach’s sacrifice. They gathered a day early to highlight the differences between the pretensions of the government, which on this day was signing a new accord on human rights at the Vienna meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and the realities of its repression. Undeterred by the potential for negative foreign reaction, Prague police charged the crowd, arresting almost one hundred persons and beating many more. For the next five days police did battle with street crowds ranging in size from five hundred to five thousand, fulfilling Jan Urban’s hope by filling the jails with hundreds of demonstrators. Among them was Vaclav Havel. In February a Prague court sentenced him to nine months in prison for antisocial activities. The newly restive activists did not consider Havel’s sentencing a defeat, calculating that the trial of only Havel—none of the other arrested persons was put on trial—was a sign of weakness. The duration of the demonstrations was also encouraging. At his trial Havel spoke of how surprised and impressed he was when on January 16 many uninvolved passersby joined in to protest the brutality of the police. Earlier he had warned the authorities that “the situation is more serious than they think.” Now, he said, “I suddenly realized that the situation was more serious than I myself had thought.” Outside observers were not so sure. German journalists writing early in 1989 saw little hope that Czechoslovakia

would democratize in the foreseeable future and could identify no potential political leaders among the opposition.95 The authorities supported that view. As late as September 1989, at a time when East Germans were crowding into the West German embassy in Prague, Jan Fojtik told a visiting American official that Havel was “morally insignificant and had no popular appeal. Communism

would prevail.’ In Czechoslovakia the battle of the holidays did not go as well for the opposition as it had in Hungary. The turnout to commemorate and mourn the invasion by the Warsaw Pact on August 21, 1989, was actually less than that for the spontaneous demonstration of a year earlier. In Bratislava an effort of a handful of Slovak Charter 77 activists, among them Jan Carnogurksy and Miroslav Kusy, to lay flowers on the spot where Russians had killed a fifteen-year-old girl in 1968 ended quickly with their arrest. The incident received little publicity, and the demonstrators stayed in jail until the November events.9” Neither the Soviet nor the Czechoslovak regime seemed willing to give an inch on their interpretation of the 1968 invasion as a rescue of socialism from counterrevolution, although by 1989 Soviet historians and other public figures were admitting a Soviet mistake. But the regime could not contain tension and anticipation. Everyone knew about the Polish election. Late in June four authors, including Havel, released a statement entitled “A Few Remarks” that called for freedom of assembly, a free

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 181

media, and open discussion, among other things. Within two months twenty thousand persons had signed it, the first time such a document had obtained widespread support outside the narrow circle of dissidents.°8 Late in the summer,

as East Germans crowded into the West German embassy in Prague, a harvest of little Trabant automobiles, abandoned on the streets each night, seemed to spring up each morning like mushrooms, providing visible proof to thousands of Prague citizens that events were on the move.*? With huge demonstrations occurring in East Germany in October, many Czechs in the Moravian capital of Brno felt that surely something big would happen on October 28, the traditional celebration of the formation of the Czechoslovak republic in 1918, and they crowded into the center of town. The tension was almost unbearable, as for several hours police and citizens milled around together, but nothing happened. Perhaps in the spring, some hoped.!°° On Friday evening, November 17, the official Socialist Youth Union, in coop-

eration with a newly formed independent student organization that had been recognized only in September, organized a student ceremony in Prague to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of a Czech student by the Nazis.1%

It could have been expected that this gathering might produce a confrontation, especially since there had been minor demonstrations on November 15, but the authorities could not very well cancel this traditional anti-Nazi ceremony. The meeting provoked real interest among students because, for the first time, representatives of both the official student organization and its newly formed independent rival were going to be permitted to speak. When the rally first formed at a student living area, the speakers began to call for reforms, removal of the Jakes regime, and democracy. Several thousand of the thirty thousand participants decided not to stop with lighting candles at the VySehrad cemetery, as originally planned, and spontaneously set out for the traditional demonstration point, Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. As they were coming up Narodny Street,

near the Magic Lantern theater, the police blocked their way and brutally beat a number of students. The news quickly spread around Prague that many students had been badly injured and one even killed. Later investigations showed that no one had been killed, but this rumor reported soon by Radio Free Europe on information provided by Petr Uhl provided the spark that set the nation aflame.! The two main political movements that were shortly to take power formed themselves within little more than forty-eight hours of the November 17 events. On Sunday, November 19, a group of Slovak writers, artists, and intellectuals met in a Bratislava art gallery and formed Public Against Violence (Verejnost’ proti nasiliu—V PN), while the previous evening in Prague, Havel convened a meeting of the main opposition groups, including even the revisionist Communist movement Obrada (Rebirth). The assembled company created Civic Forum (Ob¢canské Férum—OF) “as a spokesman on behalf of that part of the Czechoslovak public which is increasingly critical of the existing Czechoslovak leadership.”1°3 If an independent society had been slow in forming in Czechoslovakia in comparison to Poland and Hungary, it almost caught up in the ten days following

182 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the November 17 events. On the very night of the original confrontation actors in Prague called their colleagues from around their country. The next day a meeting of four hundred theater people voted to go on strike. The sign “On Strike” in front of theaters throughout the Czech lands had a powerful psychological impact.!%* Theaters also provided convenient meeting places, as well as mimeograph machines and other equipment, to local Civic Forum and Public Against Violence groups, which spontaneously formed in many places. Naturally the Prague students, especially those in law and the arts, responded immediately to what they quickly began calling “the massacre.” In these pre-

Internet days, students fanned out across the country with copies of a videotape showing the police beating the demonstrators. By Sunday videos of “the massacre’ had arrived in Brno, Bratislava, and elsewhere. On Monday students throughout the country went on strike, formulated demands, and even created a computer network to keep in touch.! Within days small groups of students were knocking on the doors of factories and visiting villages to bring their message of freedom. Sometimes the people’s militia did not let them into the factories, and sometimes peasants called them criminals and troublemakers; but the cumulative effect of these small teams speaking hitherto forbidden words was tremendous.!°¢ The presence of well-known theater personalities in the teams that went to the factories and villages provided convincing evidence to ordinary citizens that something very unusual was happening. Pushed by the students’ enthusiasm and the growing response their strike and demonstrations had evoked, Czechs and Slovaks suddenly knew that after East Germany and Bulgaria it was their turn. On Monday night, November 20, hundreds of thousands of people jammed into Wenceslas Square noisily rattling their car keys and chanting “This is it” and “Now is the time.” Within just seventy-two hours, the seemingly vertical Czechoslovakia domino had entered its accelerating arc of fall. As huge crowds gathered every night in Wenceslas Square and similar crowds took to the streets in cities like Brno and Bratislava, the regime attempted to salvage the situation by jettisoning Jakes and Fojtik and forming a new government.!0 Meanwhile, in a frantic series of nonstop meetings held in the Magic Lantern Theater, the newly formed Civic Forum proceeded in a remarkably open and sensible, albeit chaotic, way to create a new public program for Czechoslovakia, one not only consistent with Charter 77’s notions of ethical pluralism but also with the practical exhibitions of electoral democracy and, through the vigorous and persuasive prodding of Vaclav Klaus, the free market.!0 Different people have different memories of when they became convinced the regime was finished.!°? Some thought so from the beginning, others remember when Alexander Dubéek, looking, as Garton Ash puts it, as if he stepped out of an old black-and-white photograph, appeared together with Havel on the balcony of the Socialist party publishing house in the middle of Wenceslas Square. The crowds cheered him ecstatically, honoring him as a symbol of honorable resistance to the Soviets, even if they found his idea of socialism with a human

face passé. Others cite the moment when Prague party leader Stépan tried to

CHAPTER 5 e The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 183

rally the workers of a huge local factory against the students by telling them, “We

do not intend to be dictated to by children.” “We are not children,” the workers roared back. Then there was the moment when the people’s militia, which played a significant role in the Communist seizure of power in 1948, came from the provinces into Prague and Brno but proved completely unusable, ashamed, as interviewed participants said on television, to be there. And finally there was the two-hour general strike, called for lunch hour on November 27 so as not to interfere with work. (It was a very Czech revolution—the Prague demonstrations did not start until after working hours for the same reason.) The great success of the general strike convinced even the last doubters that this was indeed it.1° Two days later the federal assembly overwhelmingly voted to revoke the constitutional articles guaranteeing the party’s leading role, which had been one of the prime demands of the student strikers from the beginning. Meanwhile, representatives of the government were meeting with their counterparts from the Civic Forum in what has been called the Czechoslovak roundtable discussions. Under threat from the streets, the regime moved much faster than their counterparts in Poland, agreeing in a series of ten meetings to form a new coalition government dominated by non-Communists.!!! On December 9 Gustav Husak finally resigned from his by now purely symbolic office of president, and the next day, only three weeks after the initial student march, the new government took power. After brief negotiations and some constitutional fudging, Alexander

Dubéek was co-opted as the chairman of the national assembly, which thereupon unanimously elected Vaclav Havel the new president of Czechoslovakia. On January I, 1990, Havel opened his address to the nation with these words: “T do not think you appointed me to this office for me, of all people, to lie to you.” Thus did the end of what Garton Ash calls “the most delightful” of 1989's revolutions, the velvet revolution, pose a newly difficult challenge for its inspiration and leader: living in truth at the top.!!2

THE END OF THE CEAUSESCUS Nicolae Ceausescu lived at the top for twenty-five years, but never in truth. In the 1980s his regime became one of the world’s most notorious dictatorships, and he himself became as far removed from reality as any European ruler in modern times. During this period Ceausescu bent the entire country to the task of paying off Romania's foreign debt. The variety and pettiness of the devices he implemented to do this were endless. To increase the export of foodstuffs, which would provide hard currency, he introduced rationing in 1981. Ceausescu and his wife Elena were themselves fanatic about their diets. In 1982, after accusing Romanians of being too fat, he created a Rational Nourishment Commission to reduce the population's caloric intake through a “program of scientific nourishment.” For the rest of the 1980s the food situation for ordinary Romanians deteriorated so dramatically that by the end of the decade simply getting any kind of food at all required substantial effort for every family.

184 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Energy was another enervating problem. The Romanian economy expended about twice the energy per capita of its neighbors, but, due to the high concentration of grossly inefficient heavy industry, little of this energy found its way into households. To make sure industry had enough, Ceausescu forbade citizens from having more than one 40-watt light bulb per room. Cities and towns were barely

lit in the evenings. In the winter the common central heating plants kept the temperature in apartments in the mid-fifties—that is, when heat was available, which was sometimes only a few hours a day. Apartment dwellers in the cement urban conglomerations favored by Communist planners everywhere could routinely go without hot water for a month. In a few cases people froze to death in their own apartments.!3

In a renewed effort to add labor to the already fully employed economy, Ceausescu trotted out his natalist policy of the 1960s.!14 Despite laws against abortion, by the early 1980s Romania was experiencing more than one abortion per live birth (oral contraceptives were illegal, and other contraceptives were not available). Cracking down once again, Ceausescu ordered random gynecological examinations of Romanian women at their workplaces to insure that they were having their menstrual cycle and, if not, that they carried their pregnancies to term. Divorce became almost impossible, and married couples without children had to pay a special tax. The death rate of women went up, mainly through botched illegal abortions, and the number of abandoned and orphaned children increased dramatically.

Ceausescu’s efforts to conserve foreign currency went to humiliating extremes. International employees had to remit half their earnings to the government. Approved and loyal scholars attending foreign meetings received no foreign currency while abroad. Yet if they wished to stay overnight in the facilities of a Romanian embassy while en route home (by Romanian airlines, of course), they had to pay hotel rates in foreign currency. On one occasion, a personal aide of General Ilie Ceausescu, Nicolae’s brother, spent the night in a railroad station when he could not come up with the required foreign currency on his way home from a conference. All of these measures, and more, reflected Ceausescu's adamant belief that the way to economic progress was through the vision and rational planning of the party. “We cannot let each enterprise produce according to its wishes or contract what it wants,” he said at the 1984 party congress. Progress will come only with “an increase in the role played by the state,” and, he promised, the security police would “take measures against anyone who violates order, the laws and norms of social coexistence.” But Ceausescu’s “norms of social coexistence” were in fact simply those schemes devised to force Romanians to follow his orders. Is productivity down? Introduce a piecework system that has the effect of lowering wages by 25 percent. Energy sector not producing enough electricity? Decree a “militarized regime” in the electrical generating industry whereby directors would share responsibility with military officers for “the strict observance of technological exploitation and maintenance norms.” Production lagging in the coal mines? Decree a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week work

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 185

schedule. Workers will have two days off for the May Day parades? Order they have to make it up in overtime. Food supplies dwindling? Direct users of private plots to supply the state with at least one cow, one pig, chickens, ten rabbits, one swarm of bees, and four kilos of silk cocoons a year on threat of losing their plots.115 And what about the shortages, the lines, the brownouts, and the rustedout buses that hauling Romania back into the nineteenth century? Nonsense. The statistics showed that the consumption of agricultural goods was growing every year “in accordance with the needs of the population.” And what if the statistics did not show this in reality? Make them up. In October 1989 Ceausescu announced that grain production that year had reached sixty million tons. In fact, figures released after the revolution showed it had been fewer than seventeen million tons.1!6

The oppressive conditions in Romania made it very difficult for a democratic opposition to arise there. This was not because of lack of discontent, even outbursts of rage. In 1977, for example, massive strikes broke out in the Jiu mining region, but heavy-handed repression and some wage increases restored order. The leaders of the strike simply disappeared. In 1979 some two thousand persons across the country created the Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania, but it lasted only two weeks before it was savagely repressed. Eight years later an announcement of a wage cut infuriated workers in the Red Truck factory in Brasov. Even though the Red Truck factory was one of the most favored manufacturing plants in Romania in which almost half the workers were affili-

ated with the Communist youth league, the meat ration for a worker there in 1987 was fewer than twenty pounds for the entire year.!'7 On November 15, 1987, several thousand frustrated workers marched to the center of the city singing a patriotic Romanian song from the revolution of 1848 and proceeded to sack the local party headquarters. Once again vigorous repression put the outbreak down, and the leaders disappeared. The Romanian press made no mention of the incident or of other reported riots and demonstrations in other cities. In 1983 Ceausescu ordered that all typewriters be registered with the police, who were to keep a sample page typed from each machine on file to be able to trace samizdat publications, of which, therefore, there were very few.!!8 Abroad

the Security apparently murdered regiment opponents, and three consecutive heads of the Romanian section of Radio Free Europe died under mysterious circumstances.!!9 Whereas in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria Gorbachev’s accession to power obliged regimes at least to mouth the principles of perestroika and glasnost, Ceausescu made it perfectly clear there would be no such nonsense in Romania. Gorbachev received a markedly cool reception on his visit in 1987,

at which time Ceausescu stressed that each socialist country had the right to “decide its own development, path and forms.”!20

The most notable sign of Ceausescu’s megalomania was his penchant for massive construction projects. In one of these, he tore down one of the largest monasteries in southeastern Europe, a decorated eighteenth-century structure, to build a huge complex called the Center of the National Councils of Workers’

186 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Democracy. Its main feature was innumerable meeting halls, the largest of which would have held twelve thousand persons and would have boasted a dome three times as large as St. Peter’s in Rome, had it been completed. Outside Bucharest he reinstated the Bucharest/Danube Canal project abandoned after Stalin’s death, running a local river completely dry in the process and killing all marine life in it. His most massive project he planted smack in the middle of Bucharest: the House of the Republic, an almost inconceivably large palace that his epigones compared to Nero’s palace in Rome. To do so, he summarily evicted thousands of persons from their homes and razed eighteen churches, including five historic structures, as well as scores of historically significant houses and buildings. Seen at the time as a grandiloquent monument to Ceausescu’s utter lack of feeling for the human dimension of life and his desperate need for contrived and unassailable grandeur, today the gigantic building, which covers several city blocks and remains uncompleted, has been reclaimed for use by the Romanian parliament and senate, as well as for other uses. Consistent with his dismissal of human needs and with his simplistic concept of proletarian modernity, in the mid-1980s Ceausescu undertook the reconstruction of the centers of Romanian towns as part of a moribund plan from the early 1970s for “systematizing’ the Romanian countryside. Dinu Giurescu writes that in the 1980s the centers of twenty-nine towns, including many sizable ones, were 85 to 90 percent razed. In place of the varied and often charming structures

characteristic of Balkan towns, boxlike apartment buildings filled with small apartments assigned strictly on the basis of family size were built.!2! In the countryside the analogous plan was to bring the city to the country by consolidating the thirteen thousand Romanian villages, in which just under 50 percent of the population still lived, into about seven thousand villages grouped around five or six hundred administrative centers.!22 “Old-fashioned” and “inefficient” individual peasant homes would be bulldozed and replaced by “modern” and “efficient”

two- and three-story cement apartment houses, thus bringing all Romanians together, Ceausescu rhapsodized, into one harmonious class of working people, a truly socialist society. By the time Ceausescu was removed from power, only a few village resettlements had taken place, but the international backlash against this brutal plan was

substantial. The focus of much of the attention was the allegation by Hungary that the resettlement plan was designed to destroy the Hungarian nationality in Transylvania. This was an exaggeration, since as far as is known the only villages actually bulldozed were Romanian and the suffering that could be anticipated from the plan would be spread throughout the entire country. But the Hungarians were quite right that Ceausescu had every intention of denationalizing the Hungarian minority in Transylvania and had been engaged in that project for many years.

For the first ten years or so after World War II the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, which numbered more than two million persons, received fairly

good treatment, and ethnic relations in Transylvania were not particularly

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 187

strained.!23 The Hungarian Autonomous Region, founded in 1952, was not really

autonomous and did not include all the Hungarians, but it did at least recognize Hungarians as a separate people and Hungarians were permitted their cultural and even political organizations. Because of these benefits, Gheorghiu-Dej declared the nationality problem in Romania solved as of January 1953.!24 But after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Romanian-Hungarian relations deteriorated. In 1959 Gheorghiu-Dej merged the Hungarian-language University of Cluj (Bolyai University) with its Romanian counterpart (Babes University) and began chipping away at the Hungarian Autonomous Region. It was finally abolished in 1968.

During the 1970s criticism of Romania because of its assimilationist pressure on the Hungarian minority in Transylvania grew, not only because of increasing complaints from Hungary, but also because of the growth of international interest in human rights touched off by the Helsinki accords and by President Jimmy Carter's emphasis on the subject. Ceausescu, always thin-skinned and committed to an elaborate historical myth of constant Romanian presence in the Carpathian basin since Roman times, fought the growing international criticisms with those

weapons at his disposal—propaganda, denunciations, and disinformation.!?5 Using as his justification the nationalist argument that Hungarians were foreigners aiming to destabilize Romania, he narrowed the scope of Hungarianlanguage education, limited the number of bilingual signs, intensified pressure on Hungarian churches, and periodically announced that the nationality problem in Transylvania was solved, but to no avail. By 1988 numerous international organizations, ranging from Amnesty International and the CSCE to the United States Department of State, had cited Romania for civil rights abuses. In that year Ceausescu renounced Romania's right to most favored nation trade treatment by the United States to avoid a full-scale investigation of his regime by Congress,

even though this cost his export-oriented economy more than $250 million in trade. Early in 1989 Romania refused to sign a CSCE agreement on human rights, and later in that year Ceausescu placed Romania's representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under house arrest because he released a devastating report on abuses in Romania. Overt dissent appeared in 1989. Most courageous were the defiant letters of Doina Cornea, a specialist in French literature who had long since lost her position at the university in Cluj.12° Echoing the antipolitical themes of the 1970s, Cornea’s open letter to Ceausescu accused him of crushing “people’s innermost being, humiliating their aspirations and their legitimate claims, humiliating their conscience, [and] compelling them under pressure of terror, to accept the lie as truth and the truth as a lie.” Mircea Dinescu, a poet who came under suspicion when he praised perestroika and glasnost in a visit to the Soviet Union in 1988, lost his editorial position and publicly complained. The poet Anna Blandiana also raised her voice in protest. Three editors from Romania Libera (Free Romania),

Romania's second most important official newspaper after the party's Scinteia (Spark), were sentenced to death when they tried to publish an anti-Ceausescu

188 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

edition of their paper in the spring of 1989 (the revolution intervened to prevent the sentence from being carried out).!2”7 Most striking, six former senior officials in the Romanian Communist party, including a founding member of the party, ninety-four-year-old Constantin Pirvulescu, wrote Ceausescu an open letter enumerating his failures, from his building projects through the resettlement plans to the destruction of agriculture and the forcible reduction of living standards.128

But nothing moved Ceausescu. Isolated internationally, his economy reeling, with letters from impressive dissenters beaming back into Romania from Radio Free Europe, he showed no signs of wavering. Late in November 1989, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, after Zhivkov had resigned, and after street demonstrations had begun in Prague, the Romanian Communist party held its Fourteenth Party Congress. Ceausescu gave the traditional six-hour speech interrupted by “stormy applause,’ criticized his neighbors for not taking a socialist approach to their problems, and accepted another unanimous election as president. With the dissidents under house arrest, the country kept quiet by the ubiquitous Securitate, and Ceausescu apparently steady on course, it seemed unlikely that Romania would experience the same kind of unrest that had swept regimes out elsewhere. But it did. Even more brittle than its neighbors and out of touch with reality, the Ceausescu regime disintegrated overnight when the moment of truth

came. The incident that began the explosion was a decision taken in March 1989 to transfer Hungarian Reformed minister Laszlé Tékés from his church in Timisoara to a remote village.!22 T6ékés had aroused the wrath of the authorities by criticizing the resettlement plan, correctly arguing that it was an effort to destroy the peasantry, by pointing out violations of civil liberties, and by advocating ethnic solidarity. For many months he had successfully resisted the order

to leave Timisoara in court, using the argument that according to the rules of the Hungarian Reformed church only his congregation could dismiss him.13° However, on December 10 he finally had to notify his parishioners that he had received the definitive order to move on the fifteenth. When a few of the older members of the congregation showed up on the fifteenth to lend moral support, the Securitate decided not to interfere with what appeared to be a small, peaceful gathering. As the day progressed, however, more and more people, not members of the church, and many of them not Hungarian, began to gather. The next day crowds, particularly students and young people, took advantage of the relatively mild weather and the fact that it was Saturday to gather in the streets of

Timisoara, until by early evening several thousand persons surrounded party headquarters. Early on Sunday the seventeenth, the army, having supplanted the Securitate in the face of increasingly hostile crowds, sent military bands to march in the streets in an effort to calm the situation, but without success. Later on the seventeenth, when the situation deteriorated, the first shots were fired and the Romanian revolution began its violent course. Ceausescu, meeting with his chief advisors on the seventeenth in Bucharest,

severely criticized his commanders for not acting decisively, repeatedly

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 189

demanding that the demonstrators be mowed down a la Tiananmen Square.!3! Believing that the outburst was part of a plot by the Soviet Union and others to overthrow him through the use of “outside agitators,’ he sent the secretary

of the central committee in charge of the army to supervise the many other generals who had hastened to the scene. During the night of December 17-18 the army conducted a massacre in Timisoara. At the time it was said that four thousand persons were killed, perhaps even ten thousand. Although the number was actually far smaller—the official count announced in June 1990 by the new government was ninety-seven—the discovery of hastily dug graves containing mutilated bodies a few days later gave revolting evidence that a serious bloodletting had occurred.132 Reassured, Ceausescu left on December 18 for a scheduled two-day visit to Iran. But the demonstrations did not stop. In Timisoara a general strike completely shut down the city on December 19. By the end of the day the army began to withdraw. The professional officer corps in Romania was none too happy with Ceausescu, who did not trust them. Naively confident in the superior socialist morality of proletarians, Ceausescu had instituted a program early in the 1980s of rapidly training reliable workers from factories to be officers and immediately placing them in command of units. He thought this would make their loyalty more certain. What it did, of course, was to alienate the professional officers. The army was poorly equipped, especially in comparison with the Securitate, and its troops often were used for demeaning nonmilitary uses, such as bringing in crops or even working in factories. In mid-1989, for no announced reason, promotions for that year were canceled, leaving many of the most able officers in a highly irritated state. The army may have decided as early as December 19 that it did not want to continue to shoot Romanians in support of Ceausescu. On the evening of December 21 it had become quite clear that the army had abandoned the royal family. On December 22 a Democratic Front Committee assumed power in Timisoara. The army had completely withdrawn. While Ceausescu was in Iran, demonstrations and strikes spread to other cities, including Oradea, Arad, Alba Iulia, and especially Cluj and Sibiu, where a number of protesters were killed. The only information that appeared in the Romanian media concerning these events was the vague admonition to reject the “offensive by reactionary and imperialist circles.” By the time Ceausescu returned on the twentieth and went on television to praise the army for carrying out “to the full its duty to the country, the people, and the gains of socialism,” the crisis had become extremely serious. Ceausescu apparently was beginning to grasp the danger. He undertook to salvage the situation through repression, by playing the nationalist card, and by rallying the working class, in which he continued to believe he had real support. In his speech on the twentieth, he announced that any further outbursts would meet with bloody retribution, for which he would take full responsibility. To rally anti- Hungarian feeling, Ceausescu claimed that “hooligans” and “fascists” from abroad had instigated the demonstrations. But his admonitions had little effect.

190 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

For example, one report claims that government organizers quickly put together two trainloads of workers from Craiova and sent them to Timisoara to provide a show of proletarian opposition to the insurgents. When the Timisoara committee received the workers with bread and salt (the traditional peasant gesture of welcome) and told them that everything was under control and that Timisoara opposed Ceausescu, they went back to Craiova.!33 Ceausescu ordered party units in factories around the country to condemn the Timisoara “bandits,” although thus far, with the exception of his own speech, Romanian news media had not actually described what was happening there. This strategy did not work everywhere. In Cluj, for example, young workers from the industrial area behind the railroad station marched toward the center of the city on December 21 shouting “Down with Ceausescu.” But when many factories did comply in the routine manner to which Ceausescu was accustomed, he decided—perhaps encouraged by men around him who saw a chance to get rid of him—to show his control of the situation by conducting a mass meeting in the center of Bucharest on December 21. A mass meeting of this kind in Romania was a highly staged event. The first ten rows or so of “citizens” facing the tribune would be members of the Securitate in civilian clothes, unarmed in case they got any strange ideas. Workers were recruited by organizers in factories, given special admission cards, assembled in designated spots, and otherwise given the day off. Security forces surrounded all the entrances to the meeting place and admitted only those with cards. In this way sometimes fifty thousand or more “enthusiastic” Ceausescu supporters could be rallied, as they had only a month before on the occasion of the Fourteenth Party Congress. But this time, perhaps in the confusion of a last-minute event that was canceled once and then scheduled again, perhaps because plotters arranged it, perhaps because student protesters created a disturbance, or perhaps because of spontaneous combustion, during Ceausescu's speech first some whistling, then shouts of “Ceausescu dictator” broke out at the periphery of the crowd. Some say that firecrackers were set off. Astonished television watchers across the country saw pictures of the crowd raising fists, then Ceausescu looking up startled, an ineffectual gesture of quieting the crowd, then Elena saying, “Be calm! Be calm!,” then a blank screen. In about two minutes the picture was on again, now showing Ceausescu alone, but the damage had been done. Romanians all over the country, some of whom had begun to demonstrate in their own cities, saw the “genius of the Carpathians” waver, and they smelled blood. On December 22 loyal members of the regime were still trying to restore order, and Ceausescu, still somehow believing in his powers to command the masses, decided to try again to speak to the by now very unruly crowds gathered in front of party headquarters in Palace Square. But the microphone did not work, and soon it became apparent that the crowds were entering the building. Along with Elena, Ceausescu managed to flee by helicopter only a few steps ahead of the angry insurgents. The Ceausescus had several options at this point—to fly to a prepared military location and fight back, to escape abroad, or, apparently as

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 191

Nicolae himself preferred, to fly to an area like his native Oltenia, where he felt the workers supported him.!3 Instead, the helicopter that was supposedly taking them to safety landed before reaching whatever was to be its destination. After a farcical commandeering of a passing truck the Ceausescus fell into the hands of the new government. Three days later, on December 25, after a kangaroo trial that lasted nine hours, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were found guilty of genocide and shot to death by a firing squad.135

The events of December 21-25 were then and remain today enormously confusing.36 Fundamentally what happened is that the army decided to side with the people in the streets, probably in cooperation with a group of plotters who quickly arranged to form the National Salvation Front (Frontul Salvarii Nationale—FSN). Serious fighting, or at least considerable small arms fire, broke out in the center of Bucharest and elsewhere on December 22, the day the self-selected leaders of the FSN appeared on television to proclaim themselves

the new provisional government, which they led until elections in 1990. The shooting, which produced considerable bloodshed and the accidental burning to the ground of the university library, ostensibly pitted the army, now loyal to the nation, against the Securitate forces, still loyal to Ceausescu. The latter allegedly were bolstered by teams of shadowy figures called “terrorists.” Throughout the country, towns armed themselves to fend off these terrorists.!37 But none appeared. Since then observers have wondered why, if there was a real struggle against opponents of the new regime going on, the only building on Palace Square not marked with bullet holes was precisely the one containing the FSN leaders; or why the television tower that permitted the provisional government to get its message to the world was not disabled by a presumably well-trained Securitate; or why, over the next two years, Securitate people seemed to end up in high governmental positions. The chaotic nature of the events of December 1989 makes it highly unlikely that a fully satisfactory account of the Romanian revolution of 1989 can ever emerge. At the two extremes are variations on the plot theory on the one hand, and the elemental emanation of popular will theory on the other.!38 Some believe that the entire operation from the demonstrations in Timisoara to Ceausescu's death, were the work of a plot put in train some time before by the eventual leaders of the FSN. In its extreme form, such as the view that the Hungarians were behind this plot, this type of explanation is more a reflection of the propensity for plot theories among some elements of Balkan society than it is a likely scenario. But less extreme forms of the plot theory are not at all implausible. It does seem likely that some measure of planning, or at least laying out of scenarios and possible options if an opportune moment should arrive, did occur. The other extreme is the myth assiduously maintained early on by the FSN that the revolution was a spontaneous outburst of the heroic Romanian people, who granted the FSN the heavy responsibility of introducing democracy to Romania. Given the utility of such a theory for the FSN and its successors, and the fact that almost the entire leadership of not only the new regime but of many governments to follow were

192 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Communists who ran their new country with a heavy hand, one may also doubt the accuracy of that claim. Wherever the truth lies, it would be a mistake to concentrate on conscious actions put into effect by plotters.!39 The Romanian revolution was accomplished

by the spontaneous and self-activating actions of hundreds of thousands of people across Romania who acted courageously at a time when it was not at all clear that several decades of serious repression was about to end. Some of these people paid with their lives, the only people to do so in East Europe’s miraculous year. Their sacrifice suggests that Romanians wanted to overcome the humiliation of the dark years with at least as much passion as did the Czechs, the East Germans, or any of the other peoples of the region. Perhaps the summary view of the Romanian experience that is closest to the mark was the perceptive observation of Nicu Ceausescu, the ne’er-do-well son of the deposed rulers who by mid-1991 was the only member of the family or its entourage still in prison. He characterized the events in Romania as a “coup d’état that took place against the background of a revolution, or a popular revolt.” Nicu Ceausescu, for all his many faults, understood the essence of the revolutions of 1989. Whatever specific events happened in the various countries involved, all of them were made possible by people throwing off forty years of passivity. The popular revolutions of 1989 produced many potent visual images of the people in action: dancers on the Berlin Wall; thousands of people in Sofia maintaining candle-lit vigils; a Romanian demonstrator in Cluj baring his chest to armed soldiers, who subsequently shot him to death. Other memorable images included the somber and impressive face of Tadeusz Mazowiecki as he took office as the first non-Communist premier in almost forty years; Ceausescu’s surprisingly ineffectual hand gestures when the crowd began jeering; and the gruesome pictures of his bloody remains. Symbolically the most powerful of them all was the picture of Alexander Dub¢ek, the living relic of failed socialism, and Vaclav Havel, the embodiment of the impossible hope, waving together to hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks gathered below them in Wenceslas Square: two bookends to twenty years of economic futility and moral failure cheered by the primal force of a liberated people. Dubéek was the symbol of resistance to an unwanted imposition and Havel the symbol of hope in a much wanted future, but it was the people cheering them that turned the processes unleashed by Gorbachev and nurtured by Polish and Hungarian reformers into revolution. Their leaders wavered, the people caught a whiff of freedom in the air, and they reacted. “This is the time,’ the Czechs chanted, tired of not just the dreariness they lived in, although they were tired of it, but humiliated by the thousands of petty restraints the authoritarian regimes imposed on their lives. Yes, they wanted sausages and bananas and fresh air in the literal sense, but more than that they wanted to step into what they dreamed would be the fresh air of freedom. Chanting words like “Freedom, “Democracy,” and “Solidarity,” 1989’s equivalent to the “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” of 1789, hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, rarely mobilized before or

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 193

since, toppled the rotted Communist regimes of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and to a certain extent Bulgaria too. Cheering Dubéek and Havel,

for one magnificent moment hundreds of thousands of Czechs merged with millions of people throughout Eastern Europe in two ecstatic if short-lived sentiments—joy that the old regime was on its way out and hope that a better future was on its way in.

NOTES 1. A spate of books appeared in 2009 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the East European revolutions. They included Constantine Pleshakov, There is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War that Brought down Communism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Pantheon, 2009), Michael Meyer, The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York: Scribner, 2009), Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), and The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2. Keesing’s, 36,664. 3. Rudolf L. Tékés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change

and Political Succession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 302. Laszl6 Bruszt calls this strategy, typical of hard-liners attempting to save regimes as the momentum of reform picked up, “defensive liberalization.” See Laszlo Bruszt, “Hungary's Negotiated Revolution,” Social Research 57 (1990): 365-387; and David Stark and Laszl6 Bruszt, “Remaking the Political Field in Hungary: From the Politics of Confrontation to the Politics of Competition,” in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 13-55. 4. Tokés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution, 324-327. 5. FBIS-EEU-90-177, September 12, 1990, 23. 6. The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy, Analysis and Documents, ed. Andras Bozoki (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2002) contains not only some excellent analytical articles, but a detailed time line, brief biographies of the players, and some of the key documents. For a good summary, see Andras Sajé, “The Roundtable Talks in Hungary,” in The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism, ed. John Elster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 69-98.

7. Janos Kis, “Not with Them, Not without Us,” Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 4 (AugustSeptember 1989): 33. 8. For Pozsgay’s remarks see Keesing’s, 36,747. Nyers provides the source for the remaining sentiments. See his discussion in FBIS-EEU-89-149, August 4, 1989, 18. 9. This analysis relies on Bruszt and Stark, “Remaking the Political Field in Hungary.” 10. For a good discussion of the issues involved, see J. F. Brown, Surge to Freedom: The

End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 115-120.

11. Alfred Reisch, “Cliffhanger Referendum Changes Political Timetable,” Report on Eastern Europe (RFE), January 12, 1990, 12.

194 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

12. Despite the great suspicion of the left, there was nothing particularly sinister about the suspected alliance, which would be normal in a pluralist society. “I don’t think it’s necessary to look for a big secret deal,” said Miklés Haraszti. “They are allies” (quoted by David Shipler, “Letter from Budapest,” The New Yorker, November 20, 1989, 97). 13. Keesing’s, 36,961. 14. The other issues were whether (1) party organs should be removed from work places;

(2) the party should give an account of its assets; and (3) the Workers Guards should be disbanded, something already accomplished by the legislature before the referendum. All three proposals were approved with 95 percent of the vote (Reisch, “Cliffhanger Referendum,” 10). 15. For the decision to be legally binding, 50 percent of the registered voters had to vote. This condition was met when 58 percent voted. The difficulty of getting this many out for an election was dernonstrated in 1990 when the Communist hard-liners got enough signatures to force a second referendum on the same subject and only 15 percent of the registered voters voted. The fact that the November referendum was Hungary's first open election helped. 16 It was unusual to accede to this convention unconditionally. Most countries have

added some proviso or condition to their accession. Perhaps at this moment the Hungarians felt they needed action, not quibbling. 17. Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest, Hungary: Central European Press, 2010), Doc. 50, 412. Gorbachev responded to Németh’s rather dramatic statement by blandly remarking, “|W]e are also becoming more open.” 18. See, e.g., Brown, Surge to Freedom, 130. 19. See Robert Darnton, “Time and Money,” in Berlin Journal 1989-1990 (New York:W.W. Norton, 1991), 297-309. For the “clueless” quote, see ibid., 199. 20. Irwin L. Collier, Jr., “GDR Economic Policy during the Honecker Era,” Eastern European Economics 29, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 5-29. 21. Three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Erich Honecker admitted the results were fraudulent (New York Times, February 16, 1990). 22. Norman Naimark, “Ich will hier raus’: Emigration and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic,” in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac, 82. 23. Washington Post, September 12, 1989. 24. Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Nascent Civil Society in the German Democratic Republic,” Problems of Communism 38 (March-June 1989): 97.

25. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, eds., “Ich liebe euch doch alle!” Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS (Berlin: Basis Druck, 1990), 47. I would like to thank Mary Fulbrook for this reference. See Richard Popplewell, “The Stasi and the East German Revolution of 1989,” Contemporary European History 1 (1992): 37-63; and Karl-Dieter

Opp and Christian Gern, “Dissident Groups, Personal Networks, and Spontaneous Cooperation: The East German Revolution in 1989,” typescript. 26. FBIS-EEU-89-177, September 14, 1989, 29. 27. FBIS-EEU-89-180, September 19, 1989, 25.

28. Gorbachev offered the “scumbag” (mudak) opinion upon his return from the festivities (according to the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, in Masterpieces of History ed. Svetlana Savranskaya et al., Doc. 90, 548). For the “too late” remark, see Michael J. Sodaro, Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev (Ithaca,

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 195 N.Y.: Comell University Press, 1990), 378, quoting an account by Krenz. Gorbachev claimed that he had been commenting on his own experiences, not providing criticism of Honecker (Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997], 156). 29. The figures for the numbers of persons at the Leipzig and other rallies are extremely imprecise and vary from author to author. The numbers presented here are simply those that seem plausible to me and should be considered as indicative of an order of magnitude only. 30. Naimark, “Ich will hier raus,” 89. 31. Ibid., 90.

32. Fred S. Oldenburg, “The October Revolution in the GDR-System, History, and Causes, Eastern European Economics 29, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 62.

33. Mark Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War,” Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 571.

34. Foran excellent discussion of the Leipzig events that stresses the indecision and shaky loyalty of the local forces, see Steven Pfaff, Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany: The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 165-189. 35. Maier, Dissolution, 135-146; Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1993), 111-120. 36. Konrad Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34.

37. It turned out that Zimmerman had been a Stasi informant for a number of years.

38. The following is taken primarily from Pond, Beyond the Wall, 132; and Maier, Dissolution, 160. 39. Even the hardline Czech government was urging the East Germans to “handle departures by citizens of the GDR to the FRG directly” rather than through Czechoslovak territory (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 294, Doc. 27, GDR Ambassador in Prague to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, November 8, 1989). GDR=[East] German Democratic Republic. FRG=Federal Republic of [West] Germany. 40. Sodaro, Moscow, Germany, and the West, 379.

41. CWIHP electronic collection, End of the Cold War, “Material for the Session/For Circulation in the Council of Ministers, Draft: Temporary Transition Rules for Travel and Permanent Exit from the GDR, Berlin,’ November 9, 1989. Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), www.CWIHP.org, by permission of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 42. Fora transcript of the key elements in the exchange see “Gtinter Schabowski’s Press Conference,” Cold War International History Project 12-13 (Fall/Winter, 2001): 157-158.

43. Christopher Andrew and Viktor Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 388-389. Andropov himself approved the Markov mission. On June 19, 1992, General Vladimir Todorov, former head of Bulgaria’s intelligence service, was sentenced to fourteen months in prison for destroying the files on the case. Todorov’s codefendent, General Stoyan Savov, committed suicide before the trial began (RFE/RL Daily Report, June 22, 1992, 5).

44. As with all high-profile assassinations, there are countless theories of what lay behind it, but so far no smoking gun has been found, although it is clear that the KGB

196 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN followed Karol Wojtyta’s career with concern from the early 1970s. However, “there is no evidence in any of the files examined by Mitrokhin that [the KGB] was involved in the attempt on [the pope’s] life” (Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 522).

45. It was also approximately the time of Brezhnev’s death (1982). Zhivkov renamed the huge Kremikovtsi metallurgical combine in honor of the deceased Soviet leader. 46. RFE, Bulgarian SR/7, July 23, 1988, 23-27. 47. Zhivkov had shown his interest in computers by placing one of Bulgaria’s premier

computer research and manufacturing centers in his home town (RFE, Bulgarian SR/7, July 23, 1988, 23-27). 48. Paraphrased by Keesing’s, 34,378.

49. The “work of the party” phrase was the title of the main report Zhivkov gave at the special party conference of January 28-29, 1988, and the admonition on glasnost comes from Zhivkov’s speech to the central committee plenum of July 28,1987 (FBISEEU-88-018, January 28, 1988, 3; and FBIS-EEU-87, August 5, 1987, B19).

50. For a thorough discussion of the maze of Bulgarian economic reforms and pseudoreforms through 1987, see Richard Crampton, “Stumbling and Dusting Off, or an Attempt to Pick a Path Through the Thicket of Bulgaria’s New Economic Mechanism,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 2 (1988): 333-395.

51. See Stefan Troebst, “Zum Verhaltnis von Partei, Staat und tiirkischer Minderheit in Bulgarien 1956-1986,” in Nationalitdtenprobleme in Stidosteuropa, ed. Roland Schonfeld (Miinchen: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1987), 231-254. 52. Robert R. King, Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 189.

53. Mary Neuberger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). On the name-changing campaign, see especially chapter five. For the post-Communist experience of the Pomaks, see Kristen Ghodsee, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 54. See the statement by Stanko Todorov in From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945, ed. Gale Stokes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 232-234. 55. Interview, March 14, 1992, with Nikolai Todorov, who reports that Atanasov said this to him in 1985. 56. Ruse itself is no enclave of pure air. Misha Glenny speaks of “the chemical gas chambers masquerading as cities of Giurgiu and Ruse that glare at each other poisonously from either side of the Danube” (The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy |London: Penguin, 1990], 94). 57. This paragraph is based on an interview with Georgi Atanasov, March 17, 1992. 58. Interview with Dragomir Draganov, March 16, 1992. 59. RFE, Bulgarian SR/8, September 1, 1989, 10-11.

60. Information on subsequent developments is drawn from an interview with Nikolai Todorov, March 14, 1992; an interview with Georgi Atanasov, March 17, 1992; and several discussions with Ivan Ilchev while we were both fellows at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1990-1991.

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 197

61. The following relies on Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 180-181.

62. RFE, Bulgarian SR/11, December 15, 1989, 23, quoting Mladenov’s letter of resignation of October 27. 63. This information from Ivan Ilchev. Atanasov would not describe the specific arrangements, but he did confirm that Dzhurov took “prudent measures.” 64. In an interesting example of stereotyped thinking, the American embassy in Sofia

reported to Washington on November 9 that “no major personnel changes” were likely in Bulgaria in the near future (Masterpieces of History, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya et al., Doc. 98, 574-576). 65. See Rumyana Kolarova and Dimitr Dimitrov, “The Roundtable Talks in Bulgaria,” in The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism, ed. John Elster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 178-212. 66. Keesing’s, 34,434.

67. Sharon Wolchik, Czechoslovakia in Transition: Polities, Economics, and Society (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 260. Trade with developed countries declined by the late 1980s to about 15 percent of total trade. 68. Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga, June 1979-September 1982 (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 190.

69. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 53. 70. Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 8. 71. The regime’s total inability to understand a person like Havel is indicated by the criticism it published of him, such as a purported letter from a citizen saying, “Personally, Iam not at all surprised that he is a sworn enemy of our socialist society. It prevented him from having a governess, a maid, a gardener and a driver, and from living off unearned profits” (JPRS-EER-89-059, May 18, 1989, 24).

72. H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 79. 73. New York Times, December 8, 1989. 74. Milan Kundera, “A Life Like a Work of Art,” The New Republic, January 29, 1990, 16-17.

75. Nadya Nedelsky, “Czechoslovakia and the Czech and Slovak Republics,” in Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, ed. Lavinia Stan (London: Routledge, 2009), 41. 76. London: Reader’s International, 1987. 77. Jiti Dienstbier was released in May 1982; Vaclav Havel in March 1983; and Vaclav Benda and Petr Uhl in May 1983. 78. Miroslav Kusy, “Nationalism, Totalitarianism, and Democracy: An Interview with Miroslav Kusy,” in After the Velvet Revolution, ed. Tim D. Whipple (New York: Freedom House, 1991), 247. 79. “The Independent East European Information Agency: Interview with Petr Uhl and Jan Urban,” Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 4 (August-September-October 1989): 45.

80. For Benda’s original article and a stimulating discussion of its impact, see H. Gordon Skilling and Paul Wilson, eds., Civic Freedom in Central Europe: Voices from Czechoslovakia (London: Macmillan, 1991).

198 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 81. For a brief but good discussion of dissidence in Slovakia, see Petr Pithart, “Towards a Shared Freedom, 1968-89,” in The End of Czechoslovakia, ed. Jiti Musil (Budapest: Central European University, 1995), 201-222. 82. Pedro [Sabrina] Ramet, Cross and Commissar: The Politics of Religion in Eastern Europe and the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 78. 83. Timothy Garton Ash, “Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern,” in his The Magic Lantern: The Revolution in ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990), 96. Velehrad, close to the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, was the capital of the medieval Slavic state of Great Moravia, and was the most important pilgrimage site in Czechoslovakia. 84. This was an especially remarkable turnout since approximately one hundred thousand Slovaks were attending a traditional annual pilgrimage at Levoca at the same time (Janice Broun, Conscience and Captivity: Religion in Eastern Europe [Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1988], 94). 85. Keesing’s, 34,433.

86. RFE, Czechoslovakian SR/1, January 21, 1988, 45-48. The petition is also reprinted in Broun, Conscience and Captivity, 319-321. 87. When Karel Pala, a professor of Slavics at Brno University, asked undergraduates to identify Havel and Kundera on their entrance examinations in the mid-1980s, students reacted quite negatively, considering it not a literary question but a political provocation (interview with Pala, February 10, 1992). 88. Skilling and Wilson, Civic Freedom in Central Europe, 135.

89. Havel in JPRS-EER-89-036, April 3, 1989, 1-2; and interview with Jan Urban, February 15, 1992. 90. JPRS-EER-89-036, April 3, 1989, 2. 91. Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity, 238, 241. Well-informed Czechs and Slovaks at this time also believed the regime would fall in some vague future time like a decade (interviews with Jan Urban [February 15, 1992] and Svetislav Bombik [February 24, 1992]).

92. For a fascinating account of the false accusations that Kavan was actually an agent of the Czech secret services, and a brilliant introduction to the Kafkaesque qualities of East European politics in the early 1990s, see Lawrence Weschler, “The Velvet Purge: The Trials of Jan Kavan,” The New Yorker, October 19, 1993, 66-96; and “From Kafka to Dreyfus,” The New Yorker, November 2, 1993, 62-63. Kavan had the last laugh. He was absolved of all charges, became Foreign Minister from 1998 to 2002, and then served as president of the UN General Assembly in 2002-2003. 93. The demonstration on the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion the previous year had been similarly spontaneous, attracting perhaps ten thousand people. It was leaderless because the activists had been placed in preventive detention. 94. Vaclav Havel, “A Statement to the Court,” New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989, 41.

95. On January 2, 1989, Viktor Meier reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that “the prerequisites for democratic renewal in Czechoslovakia over the next few years do not exist,’ and on March 3 Peter Glotz wrote in Die Zeit that “no charismatic leader like Lech Watesa is anywhere near the horizon” (JPRS-EER-89-020, March 2, 1989,4; JPRS-EER-89-054, May 11, 1989, 5). 96. Paraphrase by Allen H. Kassof, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 1990.

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 199

97. Information from an interview with Boris Strecansky, February 25, 1992. 98. The document can be found in Uncaptive Minds 2, no. 4 (August-September 1989), 35. Its title was designed to recall the important document from 1968 entitled “Two Thousand Words.” 99. The phrase “sprang up like mushrooms” is that of Luda Klusakova (interview, February 12, 1992). 100. Interview with Karel Pala, Mirek Cejka, both professors at Brno University, and Ales Zlarnal, librarian, February 10, 1992. 101. For a detailed account of this event and those that followed, see Bernard Wheaton and Zdenék Kavan, The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1980-1991 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992). 102. According to the November 17 commission created by the federal assembly, which reported early in 1992, a young woman named Drahomira Drazska is the one who first reported the alleged death. There were many people lying in Narodny Street, with clothing and shoes strewn around, and she thought one of them was dead. When she looked later and saw this person was not there, she thought he had been killed and his body removed. Or she just made it up. In any event, word got to Petr Uhl, and when he uncovered a second similar report he sent the news on to Radio Free Europe. Another embellishment to this story is the possibility that the police knew the information going to Uhl was incorrect but permitted it to go out hoping to compromise him and his information service. Uhl was in fact arrested a bit later (information provided by Jan Urban). 103. Garton Ash, “Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern,” 82. Civic Forum spread through the Czech lands and into Slovakia, but by mid-1990 it had become primairly a Czech organization, while VPN became a Slovak party. See James Krapfl, “Civic Forum, Public Against Violence, and the Struggle for Slovakia,” accessed March 30, 2010. bps.berkeley.edu/publications/2009-08-Krapfl.pdf.

104. On the importance of the theatrical community to the Czech events, see John K. Glenn, II, Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). In chapter 5 Glenn provides a very readable account of the negotiations that led to Havel’s election as president. 105. Interview with Svetislav Bombik, organizing member of the Slovak Students Strike Coordination Committee, February 24, 1992. 106. Interview with Boris Strecansky, who participated in the visits to villages in Slovakia, February 25, 1992.

107. Robert G. Kaiser reports that the Soviets summoned Jan Fojtik to Moscow on November 16 to tell him the Soviets were about to repudiate the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and that military officers were hinting to their Czechoslovak associates that the Soviet troops could not be counted on to support any forcible attempt to maintain the government (Why Gorbachev Happened |New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991], 306-307). Demonstrators in Brno on Monday, November 20, were surrounded by police called in from southern Bohemia (i.e., not local people), and apparently the decision not to clear the streets by force there was made only at the last minute (interview with Karel Pala, Mirek Cejka, and Ale’ Zl4mal). The option of using force in Prague after November 17 came only on the next day, when the demonstration was still manageable, but it would have taken a very violent act. After that the crowds were simply too big (and the people’s militia too unreliable).

200 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 108. Although not, as some Slovaks argued, with an adequate program of autonomy for Slovakia. For Garton Ash’s wonderful description of these hectic days see “Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern,” 78-130. 109 Everyone I spoke with in Czechoslovakia could remember in detail exactly what they were doing when they heard the news about the events of November 17 and how they reacted in the next few days. Radio Free Europe, getting its information from the East European Information Agency in Prague (i.e., from Petr Uhl and Jan Urban), played an important role in spreading the original news, although some deduced an important event had occurred by reading between the lines of the original internal newscasts. By the middle of the week television was reporting events fairly openly, not only showing Havel but even repeatedly presenting the tape of the police beating the students on November 17. 110 Some miners failed to strike, and in OStrava three thousand persons conducted a counterdemonstration in support of the government, but the overwhelming majority of Czechs and Slovaks completely stopped work during the two-hour demonstration strike. 111. Milos Calda, “The Roundtable Talks in Czechoslovakia,” in ed. John Elster, The Roundtable Talks, 135-177. 112. For how difficult that proved to be, see Vaclav Havel, “Paradise Lost,” New York Review of Books, April 9, 1992, 6-8. 113. Foran excellent discussion of the hardships of Romanian life in the 1980s, see Anon. [Pavel Campeanu], “Birth and Death in Romania,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 1986, 10-18. 114. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Gail Kligman, “The Politics of Reproduction in Ceausesca’s Romania: A Case Study in Political Culture,” East European Politics and Societies 6, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 364-418. 115. RFE-Romanian SR/2, January 30, 1984, “Milking private agriculture,” 1-4. As was typical of socialist economies, privately cultivated plots, although comprising only 15 percent of Romania’s productive area, produced 60 percent of its milk, eggs, and fruit and almost half of its wool, meat, and grapes. 116. For the quotations in this paragraph see Keesing’s, 33,410; 34,120; and 35,141. 117. See Vladimir Socor’s description of this event, RFE/RAD Background Report/231, December 4, 1987. For the meat ration, see William Pfaff, “Romania: Breaking the Silence,” New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989, 8. 118. The Hungarian minority in Transylvania produced the only known regular samizdat publications in Romania, the short-lived periodical Ellenpontok (Counterpoints), and various issues of Hungarian Press of Transylvania. See Helsinki Watch report submitted to the CSCE May 5, 1987, Hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE 100-1-16] (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1988), 70.

119. One of these, Vlad Georgescu, the brilliant historian and Radio Free Europe analyst, died of cancer at an early age, as did a number of other regime opponents. Friends alleged that when Georgescu had been imprisoned in Romania before leaving the country, the Securitate had flooded his cell with x-ray radiation purposely to give him cancer. Outlandish as this sounds, the Securitate was quite capable of such an act. 120. Keesing’s, 35,847.

CHAPTER 5 « The Glorious Revolutions of 1989 201 121. Dinu Giurescu, The Razing of Romania’s Past (New York: World Monuments Fund, 1989), 47.

122. Foran excellent discussion see Michael Shafir, “The Historical Background to Rural Resettlement,” RFE, Romania SR/I0, August 23, 1988, 3-15. See also Per Ronas, “Turning the Romanian Peasant into a New Socialist Man: An Assessment of Rural Development Policy in Romania,” Soviet Studies 41 (1989): 543-559. 123. A Romanian human rights activist in Tirgu Mures, Smaranda Enache, recalls good interethnic relations during her schooling in the 1950s and 1960s. “It was a consciously antinationalist time,” she recalls (Judith Ingram, “Smaranda Enache: A Transylvanian Life,” Uncaptive Minds 4, no. 2 [summer 1991]: 120). Robert R. King writes that “in the first years after the Second World War, Romania was probably the most generous of the East European states in the treatment of national minorities. No one had many rights in Romania, but all were equal in this regard” (Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973], 146). For a good sum-

mary treatment, see George Schépflin, The Hungarians of Romania (London: Minority Rights Group Report No. 37, 1978). 124. Raphael Vago, The Grandchildren of Trianon: Hungary and the Hungarian Minority in the Communist States (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1989), 45. 125. The word myth here will irritate some Romanians, but the scanty evidence on which the claim is made and the enormous superstructure of justifications and rationalizations that have been built upon that evidence, not to mention the fervor and emotion with which the idea has been propagated, justifies its use.

126. For a good discussion of the situation in Romania in 1989, including the text of Cornea’s open letter of April 15, 1989, and other materials, see Dennis Deletant, “Crimes Against the Spirit,” Index on Censorship, August 1989, 25-34. 127. Interview with Lazar Virgil, longtime correspondent for Romania Libera in Cluj, March 5, 1992. 128. RFE, Romania SR/3, March 29, 1989; and SR/4, May 4, 1989. On the letter of the six former officials see William Pfaff, “Romania: Breaking the Silence,” New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989, 8-9, where the letter is reprinted. Pirvulescu was one of the few Communists ever to speak up publicly against Ceausescu, which he did at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1979. At that time he refused to join in the unanimous vote for Ceausescu and accused him of creating a personal dictatorship (Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel [New York: Free Press, 1992], 116).

129. For his authorized version of these events see Laszl6 Tékés and David Porter, The Fall of Tyrants: The Incedible Story of One Pastor's Witness, the People of Romania, and the Overthrow of Ceausescu (Wheaton, Il.: Crossway Books, 1991). 130. The best book on the Romanian revolution is Peter Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), on which much of the following is based. For an earlier authoritative account, see Nestor Ratesh, Romania: The Entangled Revolution (New York: Praeger, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1991). 131. See Vladimir Socor, “Pastor Toekes and the Outbreak of the Revolution in Romania,” Report on Eastern Europe, February 2, 1990, 19-26. 132. Radesh, Romania: The Tangled Revolution, 78. The overall total number of deaths

attributable to the revolution given in this report was 1,033. For the events in

202 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Timisoara, Sinai-Davies gives a figure of 60 civilians dead and over 200 wounded, with 700 arrested (The Romanian Revolution, 68).

133. Information from Major Harry Bucur, former party activist in the Ministry of Defense, interview, March 6, 1992.

134. For a thorough description of the movements of the Ceausescus during their last three days, see Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus (New York: Villard Books, 1991), 3-27.

135. Many mysteries surround the trial and execution. For example, whereas rumors claimed that the trial lasted nine hours, only forty-five minutes of heavily edited tape have ever been released. The FSN claimed at the time the executions were nec-

essary to discourage Securitate terrorists from continuing the fight, but no such terrorists were ever arrested or produced by the regime. Some even suggest that Ceausescu was killed under torture and then shot before the cameras for effect. As for the trial itself, there is little doubt that it was, as one American jurist put it, “a farce” (Alex Kozinski, “The Ceausescu Show Trial and the Future of Romania,” ABA Journal, January 1991, 72).

136. Two excellent articles on these and later events are Matei Calinescu and Vladimir Tismaneanu, ©The 1989 Revolution and Romania's Future,” Problems of Communism

40 (Jan-April 1990): 42-59; and Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman, “Romania after Ceausescu: Post-Communist Communism?” in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac, 117-147. See also Radesh, Romania: The Entangled Revolution. 137. A young man from Huneodora reported to me that in that town everyone got down

their old hunting rifles and created a kind of civil patrol that defended the town against the terrorists for about five days before they realized no terrorists were coming (interview with Daniel Necsa, March 4, 1992). 138. For a clear discussion of the various theories see Radesh, Romania: The Tangled Revolution, 80-119.

139. Siani-Davies (The Romanian Revolution) provides a detailed and thoroughly believable discussion of the various conspiracy speculations, concluding that the confusion was simply the result of the suddenness of the regime’s collapse and the resultant thoroughness with which lines of authority disintegrated for a few days.

140. Quoted by Calinescu and Tismaneanu, “The 1989 Revolution and Romania’s Future,” 47.

CHAPTER 6

a,

The Devil's Finger The Disintegration of Yugoslavia

¥{ usesvie had neither a velvet revolution nor a velvet divorce.! Midway through 1991 two of its six constituent republics, Slovenia and Croatia, declared their independence, ending the existence of Yugoslavia. A vicious civil war ensued that quickly spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina. An agreement known as the Dayton Accords brought the fighting to an end in 1995, but violence erupted again in the late nineties, when an Albanian uprising in Kosova

followed by Serbian repression led NATO to bomb Serbia. Ethnic emotions run deep throughout Eastern Europe, but nowhere did they reach the level of violence as they did in Yugoslavia. As one observer put it, the devil must have pointed his finger at this country.2 Grotesque atrocities, ethnic cleansing, bombardment of priceless cultural artifacts, hundreds of thousands of refugees, cities destroyed,

obsessive propaganda, and disinformation—these were the realities in many parts of Yugoslavia at a time when other East European countries were negotiating with the European Community, writing constitutions, privatizing industry, and otherwise trying to find their way back to Europe. What happened? How did Yugoslavia, the first Communist state to break with the Soviet Union and the most open Communist state in the world in the 1960s, come to this depressing impasse? The answer is not simple, but it revolves around the inherent weakness of Yugoslavism itself. The concept emerged first in the nineteenth century when Slavic peoples in Russia and Eastern Europe were beginning to understand that they spoke related languages.3 In a day of powerful empires, Panslavism sug-

gested that the Slavs might form the basis of a powerful empire of their own some day. Among the Yugoslavs (the term means “South Slavs”), the idea came to expression in the 1840s in the work of Ljudevit Gaj, a Croat who argued in his journal Danica (Morning Star) that all the south Slavic peoples were branches of the same Illyrian tribe. In the 1860s Ilyrianism gave way to the Yugoslavism of Catholic bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, who also believed in the cultural unity of

203

204 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the South Slavs. When he founded an Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb in 1867, he did not name it the Croatian Academy but rather the Yugoslav Academy. Serbs in the 1860s also had a program for uniting the South Slavs in a single state, the ideal of a Balkan federation propagated by Prince Michael Obrenovic¢. But Prince Michael, despite some desultory negotiations with Bishop Strossmayer, believed unification should take place under Serbian leadership. From the ear-

liest days of the idea of Yugoslavism, therefore, the orientation of Serbian and Croatian Yugoslavists differed, the latter thinking in broad cultural terms and the former thinking in practical terms of a state under Serbian leadership. Serbs and Croats living in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire found ways to cooperate politically prior to World War I, and a number of Croatian and Serbian intellectuals in Zagreb and Belgrade, especially students, were enthusiastic about Yugoslavism in the years before World War I. But it could not be said that the idea had struck very deep roots by 1914. Much stronger was the idea of nationalism. This is the issue over which World War I began. Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia not for any clear-cut economic or strategic aims but because of the belief that the independent state of Serbia represented the national principle

of governance, which, if accepted, would destroy the Hapsburg Empire. Since medieval times Kaisertreue, or “loyalty to the emperor,” had been the principle that held the varied Habsburg lands together. If all the peoples of that multinational empire were to adopt the notion championed by Serbia—that each ethnic group had the right to its own sovereign state—the empire was doomed. From the beginning of the war many South Slavs were thinking about what the postwar arrangements would be. As early as September 4, 1914, Nikola PasSic, prime minister of Serbia, informed the Allied Powers (Russia, France, and Great Britain) that the best way to assure the containment of Germany would be to cre-

ate a strong national state in the Balkans that would consist of all Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.5 In December 1914 the Serbian government officially adopted a set of war aims calling for “the liberation and unification of all our unliberated brothers: Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.” The non-Serbs in this state were not to be partners exactly, but in victory the Serbs intended to grant them equal rights as Serbs or as associated peoples. On the Slovenian and Croatian side, some Dalmatian and other Croatian émigrés created the Yugoslav Committee, which lobbied in London for the recognition of a new postwar state, much in the way that Tomas Masaryk did in America on behalf of Czechoslovakia. In 1917 leaders of the Yugoslav Committee and of the Serbian government met on the island of Corfu and agreed to establish a democratic, constitutional Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under the Serbian dynasty. But the Corfu Agreement left one major question unsettled: Would Yugoslavia be a centralized state as the Serbs wanted (and still wanted in 1991) or a federation of equal and sovereign peoples as the Croats wanted (and still wanted in 1991)? The actual founding of the new state took place just after the last days of the

war in conditions of utmost confusion: The Austro-Hungarian state collapsed;

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 205

an allied army, which included a significant number of Serbian troops, pushed into the Balkans from Greece and spread out toward the Adriatic, where it encountered a hostile Italy. Demobilized soldiers returning from Russia created “green armies, quasi-revolutionary movements whose members often were little better than bandits.* Independent committees and councils arose in many South Slavic areas, but the only realistic option they had was to gravitate toward Serbia, which was the only entity among them (except tiny Montenegro) that European powers already accepted as a sovereign state. In Zagreb, the National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, newly formed by politicians who until shortly before had been more or less loyal to the Habsburgs, decided to link up to Serbia. The alternative was to create an independent country, which would have faced powerful Italian claims, a victorious Serbian army, and none-too-sympathetic great powers. Only one member of the Council, Stjepan Radic, leader of the Croatian Peasant party, favored independence, and even he acquiesced temporarily in the decision to join with the others.” Late in November delegates from several parts of the future Yugoslavia gathered in Belgrade, and on December I, 1918, King Aleksandar of Serbia announced the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.’ Even though the three constituent peoples more or less voluntarily entered in to the new state, which Woodrow Wilson and the other wartime leaders blessed in Paris in 1919, it took several years for postwar violence in the new country to die down.’ The question left unsettled at Corfu also provoked bitter controversy. The Serbs, having fought heroically in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, having suffered

greatly during World War I, and having won in 1918, quite naturally expected that the new state would be an extension of the old Serbia. The Croats, noting the overbearing way in which the Serbs had incorporated Macedonia in 1913 and anticipating that the Orthodox Serbs would not be sympathetic to their Catholic World War I adversaries, feared a centralized state with its capital in Belgrade. Unfortunately, rather than fight this fundamental issue out in the constituent assembly elected for that purpose, the Croatian Peasant party, which under Radic¢ held the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the Croatian peasantry, chose to boycott the constitution-writing process. The constitution promulgated in 1921, therefore, was essentially a Serbian document that could never be satisfactory to the Croats, although the Serbs did find ways to placate Slovenian and Bosnian

political figures. From the very beginning, the actualization of the never too widely accepted idea of a single South Slavic state, a Yugoslavia, was seriously, probably fatally, flawed. Politics during the 1920s in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were extremely volatile, to the extent that in 1928 a disgruntled Montenegrin

member of parliament shot five Croatian representatives on the floor of the assembly itself, killing three of them, including Stjepan Radic. In 1929 King Aleksandar, fed up with the constant squabbling, seized power on his own, suspended the legislature and the constitution, reorganized the country into provinces based on river valleys, and changed the name of the state to Yugoslavia.

206 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Aleksandar did his best to turn his diverse collection of peoples into a nation, but his efforts to impose Yugoslavism by force only discredited the idea. Yugoslavism became associated in the minds of non-Serbs with Serbian oppression, and in the minds of the many leftist Serbs Aleksandar sent to prison simply with oppression. After Aleksandar’s assassination in 1934 by a Macedonian terrorist, the Croats were able to distance themselves from Yugoslavia by extracting an agreement from Belgrade in August 1939 that granted Croatia autonomous

status. The agreement also granted the Croats territorial gains around Mostar in Herzegovina and in northeast Bosnia that closely approximated the territories the Croats seized in 1992.!° But the agreement came far too late to permit Yugoslavia to prepare for Hitler's onslaught. When the Wehrmacht took less than two weeks to crush Yugoslavia in April 1941, the first experiment in creating a multinational Yugoslav state came to an ignominious and, for some, unlamented end. The second Yugoslav experiment began in the depths of World War II. From the beginning, the Communist resistance to German occupation, led by Josip Broz Tito and fighting for its life in the vastness of Bosnia and Herzegovina, intended to create a revolutionary Marxist state. But at the same time Tito understood that a new Yugoslavia would have to be based on a more evenhanded treatment of the various Yugoslav nationalities. From the first meeting in 1942 of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, as the precursor to the postwar government was called, the Communists advocated a Yugoslavia that would be “a voluntary union of separate peoples” and began using the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity.” When they recreated Yugoslavia in 1945, it was as a federal state consisting of six equal republics and two autonomous regions within the Republic of Serbia. The new republics were Slovenia, a relatively prosperous South Slavic people in the northwest; Croatia, a Catholic people living along the Adriatic coast as well as along the Sava River; Bosnia and Herzegovina, an ethnically mixed republic with a strong Muslim tradition; Montenegro, a small

mountainous entity of Serbs with a proud tradition as mountaineer fighters; Macedonia, newly formed in a region long disputed by Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, Orthodox Christians who were the largest group in Yugoslavia, but not a majority. Serbia also contained two autonomous provinces: Vojvodina to the north with a significant Hungarian minority, and Kosova to the south, which was ethnically predominantly Albanian.!! This new federal republic of equal peoples was probably as good a solution as the inextricably mixed ethnic character of the region permitted. The Yugoslav Communists were brutal in imposing their revolutionary programs, but their position on ethnic equality shone in sparkling contrast to the wartime situation in Croatia and Serbia. During World war II the Independent State of Croatia was run by a fanatical band of fascist enthusiasts, called Ustashe, who were so ardent in their massacres and forced removals of Serbs, Communists, Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, homosexuals, and others they defined as non-Croatian

that even the Germans were shocked.!2 In Serbia, which was under German

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 207

occupation, troops of the quisling government of Milan Nedic¢ collaborated in the extermination of Serbian Jews. And the Serb-oriented Chetniks, which was the official resistance force of the Yugoslav government in exile under the leadership of Draza Mihailovic, saw communism, not Nazism, as its main enemy and also committed its share of atrocities. To many, the Communist program of brotherhood and unity offered a superior choice to these unattractive options. The Partisans, as the Communists called themselves, had one other advantage: They won the three-cornered civil war (Chetnik, Ustasha, Partisan—Serb, Croat, Communist) that went on simultaneously with Yugoslav resistance to fascism.!3 This gave them the power to impose their vision of a Communist Yugoslavia by force. In 1945 they rid themselves of the Ustasha problem by killing tens of thousands of Croats, not all of them guilty of crimes, and in 1946 they captured and executed Mihailovic. They also cleared the field of thousands of other potential political opponents by the less dramatic but no less effective means of arrest, imprisonment, and intimidation.

These traditional methods were eminently successful in creating a Communist state in Yugoslavia, but they had a serious long-term negative effect, especially in Croatia. The wartime experience in Croatia was as far beyond the ordinary experience of Croats as the Holocaust experience was beyond the ordinary experience of Germans. And yet it happened. In Germany the question of responsibility for the Nazi period continues to be debated, discussed, and talked about even today. As a result, most adult Germans are sensitive to their historical experience and determined that it should not happen again. A real democracy has become established in Germany in good measure because Germans have faced their unpleasant past squarely.

In Croatia, by contrast, and in fact throughout Yugoslavia, the wartime horrors were presented only as contrasting examples to the benefits of socialism. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of researchers investigated every aspect of the partisan struggle, but basic questions about the relationship between the Independent State of Croatia and Croatian culture and history, or between the Chetniks and Serbian history, were never asked. Every society, perhaps every person, contains a dark element that, in the right circumstances, can burst through the normal crust of civility in an explosion of murder and plunder. But Serbs and Croats were not permitted to face that experience in their own past honestly, to atone for it, to understand it, and to commit themselves to not repeating it. This failure to provide for remembrance and reconciliation, not only in Croatia but in other parts of Yugoslavia as well, was one of the most significant negative aspects of the imposition of Communist rule in Yugoslavia. The wounds of World War II were endlessly rehashed, but never in a way that would lead to healing.

The Yugoslav Communists possessed three unifying elements that lifted their effort to build a multinational Yugoslavia above earlier ethnic conflicts, at least potentially. These were their Marxism, which provided ideology of internationalism; their partisan experience, which bonded the leadership together with powerful feelings of purpose and commitment; and their leader, Josip Broz Tito,

208 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

whose authority was unquestioned during his lifetime. These advantages did not mean that no ethnic controversies erupted in the second Yugoslavia. Ivo Banac has shown how pervasive and divisive these struggles were even in the early postwar days.'4 But in contrast to their predecessors in the first Yugoslavia, the main Communist leaders had a vision of a socialist Yugoslavia in which nationality problems would wither away if they were suppressed long enough. Tito himself hoped that someday a sense of Yugoslavism would supplant the sense of individual nations, and the party platform of 1958 spoke of a “Yugoslav socialist consciousness.” But the linkage of “Yugoslav” and “socialist” contained a critical weakness that Tito and his colleagues could never have imagined. As long as the Communist movement remained strong, Yugoslavism was not in danger. If nationalism reared its head the party could and did push it back under the surface. If the League of Communists of Yugoslavia should disintegrate, however, then the Yugoslavism it championed was in danger of disintegrating as well. And the party did disintegrate, not in the sudden and dramatic way that the parties of Hungary and Czechoslovakia did, but over a long period of time through an incremental process of decentralization. The most original social innovation of the Yugoslav Communists was their attempt to structure their economy, and eventually their entire public life, on the principle of self-administration (also called self-management). At first the idea was simply that workers should manage the socially owned factories in which they worked. But self-administration proved to be inherently disaggregating. If each enterprise should manage itself, why not each republic, each city, or each village? If self-management was good for factory workers, why not for hospital workers, university employees, or even government employees? Indeed, why not for the party itself? Yugoslav experimentation with market mechanisms reinforced the decentralizing character of self-management. The market is by definition decentral-

ized. In its search for an economy more viable than the Stalinist one it had installed from 1945 to 1948, the Belgrade regime began to dismantle its absolute economic authority as early as 1954 by giving enterprises some leeway in making business decisions and by devoting a small but significant amount of power over enterprises to local governments. Once begun, the process of devolution continued for thirty-five years, until in 1991 the center lost control completely. Both economic and political disagreements drove the decentralization process, with the ethnic factor always lurking close beneath the surface. By the 1960s

the republics of the northwest, because of their advantageous location on the Adriatic coast, were earning considerable foreign exchange from tourists.!5 How

much of that should they keep and how much should go to the federation for countrywide use? Croatia and Slovenia argued that the center took too much, while the other republics complained that Croatia and Slovenia kept too much. A similar controversy raged over the allocation of investment resources. Was it better to invest funds in the developed republics, which once again were Slovenia and Croatia, where one could reasonably hope the monies would be used effectively to increase productivity, or in the poorest parts of Yugoslavia, which desperately

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 209

needed development but where a good portion of the funding probably would be wasted?

These tough economic issues would have been difficult to arbitrate even in an ethnically homogeneous environment. But Yugoslavia was far from homogeneous. All sides perceived controversies over economic efficiency, investment allocation, and convertible currency rules in ethnic terms. Therefore the arguments were always more intense than they otherwise might have been. Constant efforts by the Communist leadership at the center could control the debates and downplay their ethnic elements, but they could not solve the basic conflicts of interest. The economic debates of the 1960s and 1970s were not as disruptive as they might have been because Yugoslavia prospered during those decades. The modest marketizing reforms the Yugoslavs undertook in the 1960s, helped along by significant foreign aid, led to significant growth that not only benefited industry but trickled down to ordinary people as well. Dennison Rusinow summed up the results with the comment that in the mid-1960s Belgrade was “the only Communist capital with a parking problem.”!* This palpable economic improvement convinced Tito, always the final arbiter in any controversy in which he took an interest, to side with those who favored a more open economy. In 1965 the economic reform known as the “New Measures’ revalued the currency, opened up foreign trade regulations, and gave enterprises more autonomy. With Tito’s blessing, Yugoslavia became the most open Communist state in the world. Its citizens could freely travel—over a million of them were working as guest workers in Germany by the end of the 1960s—and they could even emigrate. Despite contemporary reports about how badly the Yugoslav economy worked and despite continual tinkering, the influx of foreign loans during the 1970s made that decade the most prosperous and optimistic time ordinary Yugoslavs have ever known.

THE POLITICS OF DECENTRALIZATION, 1966-1976 The political concomitant to the economic reforms was decentralization of the party and of the federal political processes.!7 Two tendencies characterized the party during its early years in power: a centralizing one associated with the Serbian head of the federal security services, Aleksandar Rankovic, and a decentralizing one associated with the Slovenian theorist of self-management, Edvard Kardelj. The struggle reached its climax in 1966 with the removal of Rankovic, considered at that time second only to Tito himself, for “factional activity.” Although Rankovic’s downfall was always discussed publicly in terms of the deformation of self-management and similar acceptable rubrics, popularly his demise was seen as a defeat for the Serbs. Such a simplified interpretation overlooked the diversity of opinion within each ethnic group and undervalued the views and influence of the smaller republics, but it was widely held nonetheless.!8 Revelations of Rankovic’s brutal policies against the Albanians in Kosova and

210 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the Hungarians in the Vojvodina provided grist for the mill of those who saw in Rankovic¢ a rebirth of Serbian hegemonism. The defeat of the centralizer Rankovic led to an assertion of authority by party organs in each republic and the confirmation by the Ninth Party Congress of March 1969 that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia comprised eight con-

stituent bodies, one each for the republics and one each for the two autonomous provinces. As Steven Burg puts it, the Ninth Party Congress “institutionalized the existence of eight distinct blocs in the Yugoslav political system. ...Conflict between the blocs became dominated by the national cleavages that divided them.”!» The Yugoslav Communists had no intention of dissolving their party in the late 1960s, but the actual decentralization put in train by Rankovic’s fall began the process anyway. Decentralization came to formal government structures at the same time. The passage in 1971 of twenty-three constitutional amendments led to the adoption in 1974 of anew constitution and in 1976 to anew “Law on Associated Labor,”

all suffused with the spirit of self-administration. The amendments of 1971 and the constitution of 1974 established a complex system of delegates and consultations at all levels of government, while the law on associated labor divided all economic enterprises, even hospitals and charitable organizations, into what the Yugoslavs called “Basic Organizations of Associated Labor,’ which were to be the fundamental negotiating units in each self-managing enterprise. Edvard Kardelj, the architect of the 1974 constitution, characterized the complex new system as a “pluralism of self-managing interests.” This sounded good, but in practice the new laws made it almost impossible for the federal government to pursue a coherent economic program, since each republic now held a suspensive veto of federal legislation. Enterprises found it difficult to run themselves efficiently too, since each Basic Organization of Associated Labor had what amounted to its own mini-veto of enterprise operations. The most important political provision of the new constitution was the raising of the autonomous provinces of Kosova and Vojvodina to a position equivalent to that of the republics by giving them a voice equal to the republics in the newly created nine-person presidency and thus giving them an equal ability to hamstring federal legislation. Only after a lengthy series of steps could the federal government override the objections of a republic or an autonomous region to a particular piece of legislation, and then only when it was declared vital to the interest of the entire federation. Giving the autonomous provinces equal status with the republics was particularly repugnant to some Serbs. They looked back to Serbia’s history as an independent state, its victories in both the Balkan wars and World War I, and its domination of Macedonia and Kosova in the interwar years. After World War II Macedonia became one of the six constituent republics, and after 1974 Kosova and Vojvodina became almost equal to the republics. Was this the fruit of all their struggles—to win the wars only to lose the peace? And if autonomous regions were required in Serbia, why should there not be an Albanian province

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 211

in Macedonia or a Serbian one in Croatia? On the other hand, why should Vojvodina, with its majority of Serbs, be an autonomous province at all? These arguments eventually came to be seen as narrowly nationalistic. But in a way, these critics understood the potentially devastating effect the decentralizing reforms might have on Yugoslavia in the long run. If decentralization were to run its course, they began to ask, what would happen to Serbia, with its historic claims to Kosova and its people spread throughout Yugoslavia? In an important debate at the Belgrade University School of Law in 1971, Mihailo Djuri¢ argued that Serbia was?° already in an unequal position with respect to the other nations in Yugoslavia, such that the proposed constitutional changes, in the final analysis, are directed against its deepest vital interests. The final consequence of the change will be its complete disintegration. It is obvious that the borders of the present Socialist Republic of Serbia are neither the national nor the historical borders of the Serb nation. As is well known, outside the borders of Serbia the Serbian nation lives in four of the five other republics, but not in one of these republics can it live its own life.... The Serbian nation must turn to its own devices, it must begin to fight for its dangerously threatened national identity and integrity.

The official party harshly condemned Djuric’s arguments, and he spent time in prison for having voiced them, although they succinctly stated the arguments

Serbian intellectuals would voice fifteen years later. More moderate Serbian Communists found another, less ethnically charged way to criticize the decentralizing thrust of the constitutional changes. These critics argued that it was not possible to have a united state without efficient, independent, and strong central governmental organs. In particular they argued that it was absolutely crucial to Yugoslav economic well-being that the center control banking, fiscal matters such as the currency, and international trade rules. Croatian leaders dismissed these arguments. Savka Dabcevi¢-Kuéar, a leading advocate of the Croatian position, suggested that behind the economic arguments for a strong center lurked Mihailo Djuric’s pleas for a Greater Serbia. Calls for unity at the federal level, in Dabéevic-KuCcar’s view, were only “a mask behind which [Serbian] hegemonism hides its face.” She considered even Yugoslavism an “unacceptable phenomenon” denoting “some superior supranational phenomenon.”?!

In the most important area, the adoption of the new constitution in 1974, the Croats essentially sustained their position. Federal powers were weakened and republican powers strengthened, both in the party and in government, and Vojvodina and Kosova received greater authority, thus reining in the Serbs. But Croats could not savor their victory because ofan earlier controversy over Croatian nationalism that broke out in 1971. After the fall of Rankovic it became easier,

although not officially condoned, to express nationalist viewpoints throughout Yugoslavia. In Zagreb, late in the 1960s, Matica hrvatska (Croatian Home), a Croatian cultural society dating from the 1840s, came into the hands of nationalists, including the future president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman.2? Undertaking

212 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

an aggressive campaign to create local clubs on the basis of a nationalist program, Matica raised its membership from about two thousand to just over forty thousand by the end of 1971. Meanwhile, a trio of Croatian party leaders (Mika Tripalo, Pero Pirker, and Savka Dab¢éevic-Ku¢ar) were pressing Tito for a radical reform of the Yugoslav monetary system that would give Croatia more control over its foreign currency

assets. In November 1971 the newspaper Hrvatski tjednik (Croatian Weekly) brought things to a head by publishing a proposal from Matica hrvatska for a new Croatian constitution. It recommended that Croatia be defined as “the sovereign

national state of the Croatian nation” with the right to secession, that Croatian (i.e., not “Serbo-Croatian”) be the sole official language, that Croatian authorities take full control of all tax revenues collected in Croatia, and that Croatia establish a territorial army.23 The suggestion was even made that Croatia should have its own representative at the United Nations. These proposals, which Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union successfully put forward again twenty years later (in 1992 Croatia became a member of the United Nations), were completely unacceptable to the rest of Yugoslavia, so radical at the time as to be beyond discussion. When Tito finally realized the seriousness of the situation, he stepped in, bringing all the important party leaders to his hunting lodge at Karadjordjevo near Belgrade, where he imposed a solution. Matica hrvatska was closed and its leaders, including Tudjman, imprisoned; many student activists were arrested; the Croatian triumvirate resigned; and the party itself was “cleansed.” In 1972, to show his even-handedness, Tito purged the Serbian party too, so that by the time the constitution of 1974 was adopted he and his center of old partisan leaders had reasserted their dominance. The restructurings from 1966 through 1976 and the nationalist confrontations of the same period satisfied no one. The Serbs felt aggrieved because they had lost the battle to prevent decentralization and resented Tito’s sacking of their relatively moderate leaders. The Croats were frustrated that the center had crushed what they considered their legitimate ambitions for national identity. Tito had reasserted the center’s authority explicitly on the basis of revolutionary power, but at the same time he had permitted the creation of a decentralized constitutional arrangement that made it very difficult for that center to conduct ordinary business. Order had been restored by the special intervention of the only person in Yugoslavia with authority commensurable to the task, Tito himself. But in the day-to-day life of the federation impasse and controversy became endemic, and the day that Tito would no longer be there to manage the system was fast approaching.

THE ECONOMY TURNS DOWN In 1980 Tito performed his last service to Yugoslavia—he took a long time dying. He entered the hospital early in January for a blood clot and after declining over

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 213

the next four months, he died. When somber martial music interrupted the normal television programming on the afternoon of May 4, 1980, the Yugoslavs, who had been a bit panicky in January and February, were more or less prepared, at least for the short run. Tito’s death was not just the end of the personal rule of a pleasure-loving but not unloved dictator. It also marked the end of the entire postwar generation whose commitment to Marxism, to the Partisan experience, and to Tito himself had provided the glue that kept Yugoslavia together. Persons aged forty and under, as well as many older people, found the endless celebrations of the partisan movement, which was in fact a thrilling and inspirational struggle against terrible odds, simply boring. And self-management proved to be a fraud. Workers had almost no say in how their enterprises were run, despite spending sometimes as much as 30 percent of their time in meetings of their Basic Organizations of Associated Labor. In many of the less successful firms networks of party officials maintained their control through local party connections, republican governments, and the Socialist Alliance. By the time of Tito’s death many Yugoslavs had come to the same conclusion about socialism as had the citizens of the other East European states: it was a sham. To make matters worse, in the years before Tito’s death the economy took a downward turn. From its very beginning after World War II, the Communist regime was never willing to take the belt-tightening measures that would permit it to live within its income. As early as 1955, the American embassy in Belgrade noted that Yugoslavia could handle its deficit if it were willing to take the difficult measures needed, but its actions showed that the Yugoslavs “had no intentions of restricting domestic consumption and investment to levels which can be accommodated within their own resources.”24 And they never did. Just after the war, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) kept the country afloat, while in the 1950s rapid Yugoslav growth was fueled by American aid.?5 In the 1970s, much as in Poland and elsewhere, growth was fueled by easy access to petrodollars. But, as in Poland, instead of igniting exportdriven growth, most of the foreign loans either ended up in the pockets of workers in the form of increased consumption and a higher standard of living or were wasted in inefficient investments undertaken for political reasons. Efficiency did not increase, but debt grew rapidly, by almost $10 billion between 1974 and 1979. When the second Middle Eastern oil crisis hit in 1979 and the loans slowed down, the Yugoslav miracle was over. As an editorial in Socialist Alliance's newspaper Borba (Struggle) put it, “The present hardships are in great measure due to rising domestic consumption being fostered on the basis of foreign loans.”26 Economic difficulties were also due to the same soft budget constraints and political interference that characterized every socialist economy.2” Despite Yugoslavia'’s favorable reputation in the 1970s as a hybrid of planned and market economies, Yugoslav Communists were just as enamored of metal-eating industries as Communists anywhere. Instances of incredible waste were perhaps even more commonplace in Yugoslavia than in the other socialist economies, since eight political entities all felt they had to have their own “modern” smokestack

214 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

industries, however irrational they might be. For example, the giant iron ore processing plant at Kavadarci in Macedonia, started in the 1960s, gobbled up almost one-half billion dollars in convertible currency loans and an equivalent amount of domestic investment before being scrapped in the 1980s because the available local ore was too deficient in iron to make the plant feasible, a fact known before the project was begun. In Serbia the steel plant at Smederevo, started in 1963 and not yet finished in 1987, cost $1.5 billion in hard currency plus the equivalent of $1 billion in dinars. It was losing so much money in 1987 that all enterprises in Serbia were forced to contribute an amount equivalent to one-half of one percent of their production to keep it going, since, after all, it employed eleven thousand workers.?8

Heavily in debt, hamstrung at the center, and with a dispirited workforce, in the 1980s the Yugoslavia economy declined precipitously. Almost every measure went into reverse—social product dipped, efficiency dropped, real income

went down, and investment declined. One of the few indicators that went up was inflation, making ordinary citizens acutely aware that their standard of living was falling. Yugoslav governments spent most of the 1980s stumbling from austerity programs to currency devaluations to restructuring plans to price and wage freezes to bridging loans in a fruitless search for solutions. One author counted twenty price freezes implemented and dropped between 1965 and 1985.29 Constant stop-and-go stabilization programs produced the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, real wages and the standard of living dropped, but on the other

hand, efficiency did not improve, inflation worsened, and growth rates stayed low. Under these unstable conditions, the very term stabilization, used throughout the 1980s, became so devalued that its mere mention brought wry smiles to Yugoslav faces.

SERBIA AND KOSOVA The significant political activity of the 1980s did not take place at the federal level, which was the focus of most foreign attention. During the 1980s the future

of Yugoslavia was being decided in the republics, particularly in Serbia and Slovenia, but also to a certain extent in Croatia. The road to civil war began in March 1981 when Albanian students took their demands for better food at the University of Prishtina cafeteria to the streets in the time-honored tradition of students everywhere. Their demonstration touched a nerve of Albanian patriotic feeling, and over the next month anti-Serbian demonstrations demanding that Kosova become a Yugoslav republic became so massive that the federal government sent in troops.*° Serbs and Albanians have had adversarial relations at least since the nineteenth century. On the Serbian side, hostility is in part a function of the Serbian origin myth created in the nineteenth century and available since then to nationalist demagogues. Because the medieval Serbian empire was centered in what is today Kosova, many of the most important Serbian cultural monuments can be

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 215

found there, including the patriarchate of Pec, the center of Serbian Orthodoxy

during the Ottoman period, and many Serbian Orthodox monasteries and churches containing late Byzantine frescoes of exceptional quality. The Serbian national mythology holds that the Orthodox church preserved Serbian national consciousness over the centuries of Ottoman domination, endowing these monuments with highly charge emotional significance. Kosovo polje (The Field of Blackbirds), not far from Prishtina, was the site of the Serbs’ epochal battle with the Ottomans on June 28, 1389.3! The cycles of oral poetry that preserved the story

of that battle (and of Serbian medieval experiences), along with the Byzantine frescoes, are the most important Serbian contributions to European culture. The importance of the Kosovo myth to Serbian politics lies not in these actual historical qualities but in its selection by the nationalists as the appropriate symbolic universe of Serbianness.*2 It provides a vocabulary of experiences outside of time, so to speak. For example, the contrast between the mythically heroic battle fought by the brave Serbian warriors at Kosovo polje and the final outcome, which was Ottoman domination, can be understood as the “normal fate of Serbs” —to die for freedom in war and yet to be denied the fruits of victory, as, for example, to win World War II and yet “lose” “in 1945 and 1974. Slogans attractive to the ear can be written in the decasyllabic style of the folk poetry and Slobodan MiloSevi¢ could be described in terms reminiscent of the folk epics.%3 Many Serbs feel emotional about Kosova, but few Serbs actually live there.

The proportion of Serbs living in Kosova dropped from 24 percent 1953 to less than 10 percent in 1990.34 This does not bother the most extreme nationalists, who claim that Kosova remains Serbian even if not a single Serb lives there.35 The

more common nationalist argument is that the Serbian population has declined precipitously because of harassment by lawless, irredentist, racist Albanians. More likely reasons are the high birth rate of the Albanians (more than thirtytwo per thousand) and the poor economic prospects in the region (unemployment was about 25 percent 1980), which has led to Albanian as well as Serbian emigration. Kosova is poor, but not for lack of resources devoted to its economic development. Up to 1980, about half of the federal monies allocated for underdeveloped Yugoslav regions went to Kosova. But these funds tended go into loss-producing capital-intensive industries, such as mining and power generation, rather than into labor-intensive industries like consumer production, so they did not alleviate unemployment. Worse, a significant amount of the money ended up increasing the number of administrators in the social sector, so that instead of improving efficiency, the investment funds probably decreased it. Whereas in 1954 per capita income in Kosova was 48 percent of the Yugoslav average, in 1980 it had dropped to only 28 percent of the national average. When the unrest came in 1981 the Serbs and the federal government both

denied that they bore any responsibility for the serious problems the region faced, calling the outbreak a counterrevolution led by outside agitators who were trying to unite Kosova with Albania. There was a certain superficial

216 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

plausibility to this argument, since in the 1960s Kosova had adopted the literary language used in Albania rather than one based on its own dialect, and at least half of the books used in Prishtina University originated in Albania.

But from the initial riots in 1968, through the second wave of demonstrations in 1981, right up to the civil war of 1991, the leaders of every major Albanian movement in Kosova stoutly denied any interest in joining Albania and demanded only that Kosova become a republic in Yugoslavia or, later, that it become independent.?” The battle lines were clearly set: on the one side Albanians, who constituted 90 percent of the population of Kosova and wanted to have their own republic in the Yugoslav confederation; on the other side Serbs, to whom Kosova was an emotional homeland that they wanted to control more fully than the 1974 constitution permitted. The government tried to avoid the subject, although some intellectuals, especially the noted nationalist writer Dobrica Cosi¢, maintained sympathetic contacts with the dissidents. But in 1985 Djordje Martinovic, a Serbian peasant from Kosova, ended up in the hospital with cuts in his anus caused by a broken bottle.28 Confused reports about the incident abounded, such as that Martinovic was attacked by Albanians, or that Martinovi¢c had injured himself in an act of masturbation gone wrong. Whatever was the case, this ludicrous affair ignited a firestorm of agitation in Serbia. Kosova was occupied by Albanian fascists, claimed one writer, who were ethnically cleansing Serbs in a policy of genocide.’ As Serbs rallied in defense of what they saw as their threatened compatriots in Kosova, they set the stage for the emergence of the man they hoped would bring respect to a besieged Serbia.

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC In the first few years after Tito’s death Belgrade intellectual life had proceeded on several tracks.4° One tendency was what might be called the democratic revival

track. As late as 1987 a Committee for Thought and Expression could bring a substantial part of the Serbian intelligentsia on board behind a program that would have marked them as progressive dissidents elsewhere in Eastern Europe. They called for free elections, reduction of the Communist party's monopoly of power, and respect for human and civil rights. By the mid-1980s other Serbian authors were taking advantage of the relatively open atmosphere in Belgrade to open up the history of the Communist regime, exposing some of its less attractive moments, such as the degrading conditions at the Goli otok prison camp, where supporters of the Soviet Union were held for many years. Critiques of Communist Yugoslavia quickly expanded into a third arena, concerns about the problems facing Serbs in Kosova, the fate of the Serbian minority in Croatia, and other real and imagined slights. At first, these tracks were more or less separate, but as the decade wore on what was seen in Belgrade as fair and equitable proposals became increasingly to be seen elsewhere as the promotion of a nationalist program surrounding the explosive issue of Kosova.

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 217

By the mid-1980s, the idea that both Serbia and Yugoslavia needed more unity had taken center stage among Belgrade intellectuals. In 1985 some members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences (SANU) undertook to produce a statement on the Yugoslav condition, which they initially intended to send to the government rather than release publicly. In September 1986, however, an enterprising journalist leaked the unfinished document to the press, where it created a sensation.*! The first section of the Memorandum, as it came to be called, claimed that Yugoslavia was moribund and that the reason was excessive decentralization. It joined other Belgrade intellectuals in calling for more democracy, but actually its solution was from the old school, that is, to revivify “democratic socialism,” the pre-1974 style

of administration from the center.‘ The second of two parts went further, outlining the Serbian nationalist position in extreme language. Not only were Serbs suffering “physical, political, legal, and rural genocide” in Kosova, but many Serbs in other republics, especially in Croatia, were threatened by the same fate, comparable to the worst they had suffered in the twentieth century (i.e., Ustasha genocide). “The economic subjugation of Serbia,” the memorandum concluded, “can be understood only if one understands its political inferiority.““4 The SANU Memorandum did not explicitly call for changing borders or for the creation of a Greater Serbia, but its seemingly authoritative origins in the highest academic institution in the country made it the most memorable document of its time.

Slobodan Milosevic did not know about the Memorandum prior to its publication, rarely referred to it, criticized it at first, and never used it to justify his actions. In fact some observers argue that Milosevic, despite his rhetoric

and even his policies, was not primarily a nationalist at all, but only used its mobilizing force to forward his main goal—his own personal power.‘ Subtler in his political sensitivities than his colleagues, better prepared in negotiations, willing to turn on a dime when maintaining his authority required betraying a friend, and yet personally charming when he chose to be, Milosevic knew how to coerce, how to generate public outcry suitable to his plans, and how to present outrageous lies with a straight face.4¢ Born just after the start of World War II (in August 1941) of an activist Communist mother and a Montenegrin Orthodox priest, both of whom later committed suicide, MiloSevi¢ was a good law student at Belgrade University but a narrow and driven one not given to extracurricular activities. Hitching his star to his university friend Ivan Stambolic¢, the nephew of an important partisan leader, he rose along with Stamboli¢. Until 1986, little distinguished Milosevic from other successful apparatchiks. His enthusiasm for Marxism seemed perhaps excessive, but otherwise he was simply one of hundreds of Yugoslav careerists who had made their way through the system because it was the system in which they found themselves. When Stamboli¢ moved to the presidency of the Serbian Republic in May 1986 and MiloSevic took his place as head of the League of Serbian Communists, no one in the West, except a handful of specialists, took particular notice. MiloSevic’s breakthrough came on April 24, 1987. On that day an excited crowd of ten thousand agitated Serbs and Montenegrins, well prepared by local

218 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

activists with stones to hurl at the police, had gathered in front of a building in Kosovo polje where MiloSevi¢ had come to hear Serbian residents of Kosova com-

plain against the Albanians. When the crowd became unruly, as its organizers had planned, police used rubber truncheons to force them back. Milosevic heard the ruckus and stepped outside to calm the crowd. “I want to tell you,” he said, “that you should stay here. Here is your land, here are your houses, your fields and gardens, your memories....[By leaving] you would betray your ancestors and disappoint your descendants. But I do not propose that in staying you continue to endure a situation with which you are not satisfied. On the contrary. We have to change it.... Don’t tell me that you can't do it alone. Of course you can't do it alone. We will change it together, we in Serbia and everyone in Yugoslavia."4”

Various versions exist of the key phrase he uttered in the heat of this moment, such as “No one should dare to beat you,” or “No one has the right to beat the people!” Whatever his exact words, ordinary people throughout Serbia responded to the vision of MiloSevic “standing up for Serbs.” When he returned to Belgrade, a friend reported, “he was like a heated stove. He was full of emotions. He could not control his feelings. He could not calm down.”8 Milosevic had tapped into

the emotional public sensibilities surrounding Kosova: He discovered that he possessed the power to move people. The more liberal party leadership headed by Stambolic¢ had been a calming influence in the tensions between Serbs and Albanians over control of Kosova. Stambolic¢ agreed that Serbs were treated unfairly in the 1974 constitution, but he argued that Serbia's relations with Kosova were a Yugoslav problem, not a narrowly Serbian one. He had been negotiating in a relatively patient way with the other republics to change the constitution to reduce the autonomy of Kosova. In contrast to Milosevic, Stamboli¢ believed that the party should allow differences of opinions, and he brought along younger persons, even women, with an engaging openness. MiloSevic, on the other hand, believed in the Stalinist party model—complete loyalty to every aspect of the leader’s position. He thought Kosova was a Serbian

problem, not a Yugoslav one, and he was not a patient man. Rallying support among former Rankovic supporters, academicians at Belgrade University, and mid-ranking party functionaries who found the idea of a strong leader appealing in the post-Tito vacuum, Milosevic promised that the Kosova problem could be solved quickly and unilaterally, by force if necessary.

At the key eighth session of the Serbian party’s central committee held in September 1987, a surprised Stamboli¢, who had plenty of indications of his old friend’s intentions but remained remarkably passive, found himself confronting a solid phalanx of local party delegates prepared with speeches calling for a new and more aggressive leadership. Defeated, Stamboli¢ soon was recalled from his position as president of Serbia and replaced by an old partisan general.” Stamboli¢’s sudden downfall marked the beginning of a new order for Serbia.

In the next three months, in a process he termed “differentiation,” Milosevic purged the Serbian party of those who would not give prompt assurances of total

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 219

loyalty. From their new positions in control of the state television station and of what was once Serbia’ s best newspaper, Politika (Politics), MiloSevic’s cronies attacked anyone who would not abjectly support him, branding them as opposed to party unity and, worse, as anti-Serb. In Kosova itself Milosevic thoroughly purged party members too lenient toward what the Serbs now routinely but inaccurately called Albanian irredentism.%° By early 1988 Milosevic had become the most dynamic, visible, and frightening politician in Yugoslavia. MiloSevic thought in nineteenth-century terms. He was completely insensitive to other ethnic groups and knew nothing of the give-and-take of democratic politics. He simply wanted to make the Serbs the strongest and most united people in his part of the world, at whatever cost. Initially he probably thought that he could achieve this by taking control of the Yugoslav federal system through taking command of the League of Yugoslav Communists. When the party disintegrated, he tried to dominate the federal government, particularly the presidency and the army. Finally, when the federation collapsed, he turned to a more direct method of achieving both Serbian and personal grandeur: the use of armed force to create a Greater Serbia that could dominate the Balkan peninsula. His first step was to rewrite the constitutional arrangements of 1974. By accusing everyone who opposed him of being involved in an unprincipled alliance against Serbia, MiloSevic bullied the other republics into accepting Serbia's right to change its constitution in a way that would subjugate Kosova and Vojvodina to Belgrade. He packed the Kosova assembly, used mob tactics to replace the leadership of the province of Vojvodina with his own people, and by March 1989 pushed his amendments through. His most powerful tool in achieving this goal was mass rallies. In the rest of Eastern Europe people power, as it was called after huge popular demonstrations brought Corazon Aquino to power in the Philippines in 1986, was a force for democracy and pluralism. In Serbia, however, Milosevic mobilized people power to destroy Yugoslavia and to create the conditions for civil war. In September and October 1988 thirty thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, even one million people gathered in Serbian cities to shout their approval of MiloSevic’s

effort to subdue Kosova. When Albanians tried rallies of their own or conducted strikes in the important mining industry, as they did in November 1988, MiloSevic sent in the riot police and arrested their leaders. In February 1989 the most dramatic protest broke out when Albanian miners barricaded themselves underground and went on hunger strikes. MiloSevi¢ eventually tricked the miners into coming up, whereupon he arrested their leaders for “counterrevolutionary activities.” In the rest of Eastern Europe people power toppled the old Communist regimes in the name of democracy. In Serbia, Milosevic manipulated the same force by racist appeals to legitimate his transformation of the League of Communists of Serbia into a nationalist party organized on neoStalinist principles. But MiloSevic’s successful elimination of Kosova’s autonomy was a disaster for Yugoslavia and, in the long run, for Serbia too. By running roughshod

220 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

over the democratic elements in both Serbia and Kosova, MiloSevic confirmed the worst fears of the other members of the Yugoslav federation, especially the Slovenes and the Croats. The likelihood that they would sympathize with any future Serbian calls for Yugoslav unity dropped to nearly zero.

SLOVENIA AND CROATIA REACT Slovenes, as close neighbors of Italy and Austria, had long considered themselves somewhat removed from the passions of Balkan politics. They also took pride in being the most prosperous Yugoslav republic.5! More open economic policies and considerable experience with Western business practices permitted Slovenes to produce roughly 20 percent of Yugoslavia’s domestic product and 25 percent of the country’s hard currency exports while constituting only 8 percent of the Yugoslav population. When Tito died Slovenia boasted perhaps the most independently minded intelligentsia in Yugoslavia. By the mid-1980s its capital city Ljubljana could boast of an influential student press; a strong group of writers surrounding the avant-garde journal Nova revija (New Review); an activist Slovenian Writers’ Union; and the first stirrings of alternative movements of punk rock musicians, feminists, gays, peace activists, and environmentalists.*2 One of the first public battles that started Slovenia’s pathway to secession from Yugoslavia concerned the efforts of the central administration in Belgrade to introduce a common core curriculum for all Yugoslav secondary schools. Members of the writers union vigorously objected, claiming that this would lead toward Slovenes being assimilated into a nonexistent Yugoslav nationality at the cost of the Slovenian language and culture. Writers began talking about protecting Slovenian sovereignty and refused an offer by some Belgrade opposition writers to join the struggle for greater democracy in Yugoslavia. The Slovenes believed the Belgrade offer was a thinly disguised effort by Serbs to dominate the country. Only a few months after the SANU Memorandum appeared in Belgrade, Nova revija published a special issue (January 1987) entitled “Contributions for a Slovenian National Program.” Like the Memorandum, “Contributions” listed Slovene complaints about their allegedly inferior position in Yugoslavia: their language was second class, Serbian and Croatian were used in the army; immigrants from “the south” were threatening their cultural unity, and so forth. But most of the authors in this compilation did not see the solution as coming from reforms in Yugoslavia. Some did not even see themselves as Yugoslavs. Instead they believed that Slovenia should consider itself a civil society of a Central European type (i.e., not Balkan) and take charge of its own affairs. Abouta year later, the journal of the Socialist Youth League, Mladina (Youth),

published an article claiming that the army was planning a lightning arrest of important Slovene political figures to stop the growing Slovenian nationalism. Mladina had already annoyed the army by calling the Yugoslav chief of staff a “merchant of death” for selling arms to Ethiopia, and with an article showing how Yugoslavia had conspired with Sweden to ship arms to Libya. Angry army

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 221

officials hauled three journalists and one noncommissioned officer into military court and convicted them of revealing military secrets. The enormous hostility against the army that this event and its outcome provoked was not only a sign of antimilitarism among Slovenian youth, although it was that. It signified also a rejection of Communist Yugoslavia as typified by the Partisan generation and a rejection of Serbian centralism, because Slovenes correctly perceived the officer corps to be dominated by Serbs.

The Mladina trial galvanized the already intellectually prepared democratic opposition. Supporters of the accused formed a defense committee, which

they quickly turned into a Committee for the Defense of Human Rights that demanded and got an investigation of the army. In the fall of 1988 members of this committee went on to create four political parties, technically under the mantle of the Socialist Alliance but actually new formations. In May 1989 these parties, along with the Slovenian Writers Union, produced a political program advocating political pluralism and expressing the desire “to live in a sovereign state of the Slovene people.”54 Shortly thereafter they proposed making the next election, which had already been scheduled for spring 1990, open and multiparty. In the meanwhile, a group of leftist intellectuals, students, workers, and even some party members formed the Social Democratic Alliance of Slovenia, which advocated a Western style democratic socialism, while a group of nonsocialist activists created the Slovenian Democratic Alliance, dedicated to the establishment of parliamentary democracy. By February 1989 Radio Free Europe analyst Milan Andrejevich could report that about one hundred grass roots organizations and ten independent political groups were active in Slovenia.%

Far from condemning these pluralist endeavors, Slovenian Communists found ways to accommodate themselves to them, first by suggesting that the new movements remain part of the Socialist Alliance and then by moving in the direction of pluralism themselves. Early in 1989 Milan Kuéan, the head of the League of Communists of Slovenia, welcomed what he called “the opening up of political space.” “There is no real democracy without political pluralism,” he said.57 In April 1989 the Communists ran a direct, secret, and contested election, the first of its kind in socialist Yugoslavia, to elect the Slovene representative to the federal presidency. And in September of the same year, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Prague Spring, the party pushed through constitutional changes declaring Slovenia a “sovereign and independent state.” The assembly asserted Slovenia's right to secede, claimed the authority to veto the use of armed force in its territory, and deleted the provision that the League of Communists should play the leading role in society.

Creeping pluralization in Slovenia, coupled with Slovene attacks on his actions in Kosova, outraged Slobodan Milosevic. He accused the Slovenes of endangering Yugoslavia by threatening secession, which invited civil war. The Slovenes did not look upon it this way. Their strategy, which evolved in the doing

rather than in any programmatic statement, was to put a clear choice before Milosevic: Negotiate with us for a viable kind of federated Yugoslavia or we

222 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

will leave. The Slovenes denied they were advocating the breakup of Yugoslavia. “This is not secession,” a speaker of the Slovene assembly said blandly. “We want to remain part of Yugoslavia.”58 We want a third Yugoslavia, the Slovenes were saying, not one dominated by Serbia or one organized by Communists, but one based on truly voluntary association.

Still, the Slovenes were MiloSevic’s most active critics in Yugoslavia. In February 1989, for example, a mass rally in Ljubljana compared the fate of Albanians in Kosova to that of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany, which provoked a spontaneous outpouring of some one million Serbs onto the streets of Belgrade and a barrage of complaints and attacks from the Serbian side. In May, one million Slovenes out of a total population of only about two million signed a declaration protesting the Serbian treatment of Albanian miners. Serbian writers responded, criticizing Slovenes for their “fascist hatred” of Serbia and accusing them of an “unscrupulous coalition” with the Croats to denigrate Serbs. Slovene leaders responded by characterizing the Serbs as “irrational” and “arrogant.” In December 1989 MiloSevic attempted to take his version of people power to Ljubljana by organizing a mass meeting there of Serbs similar to the successful rallies he had held in Serbian towns and cities in 1988. When the Slovenian authorities forbade the meeting, an angered MiloSevic asked Serbs to boycott Slovenian goods. It became distinctly unpleasant to ask for a Slovenian product in a Belgrade store. In retribution for the boycott, which affected about 7 percent of its trade, Slovenia began to hold back its payments to the federal fund for the undeveloped regions, which reduced the monies Serbia would have available for Kosova.

Croatia was not as open intellectually or politically as Slovenia, and while its economy was in better condition than those of the southern republics, its prosperity was not uniform. Some regions, such as the one northwest of Zagreb where Tito had been born or the mountainous regions inland from the Adriatic and heavily populated by Serbs, were very poor. Others, such as the beautiful and popular Dalmatian Coast or the industrial region around Zagreb, were quite prosperous. Croatia's main problem, however, was not economic. It was ethnic. About 12 percent of the population of Croatia was Serbs. Most of these lived in Zagreb, but a significant number were concentrated in the poor karst region of southwest Croatia. In that area bitter fighting between Serbs and Croats had taken place during World War II, and in 1971 some of the most active nationalists on both sides had reemerged there. The communist regime had never been able to completely silence Croatian nationalism after the outburst in 1971, although it tried. In 1981 it once again imprisoned a key figure of the 1971 mass movement, Franjo Tudjman, and upon his release forbade him to speak in public. But in January 1989 Tudjman read a draft program for a political party he proposed founding at a meeting of the Croatian Writers’ Union, and in June 1989, after a request for a public meeting had been denied, he and a few others gathered in what they called a “nonpublic place” to create the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 223

zajednica—HDZ). By the end of the year some sixteen independent groups had formed in Croatia and the reform Communists, who were now in the ascendancy in the party, agreed that Croatia too would have to strike out in its own direction. Early in February 1990 the Croatian assembly passed a broad political reform that scheduled open, multiparty elections for April and May of that year.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE CENTER With political decisions made at the republican level pushing Yugoslavia in two different directions, a centralizing Serbian one and a pluralizing Croatian/ Slovenian one, the federal government found itself hamstrung. During the 1980s no government proved able to work the complex Yugoslav system of delegations and consultations effectively. Overall debt did not increase, because of a series

of last-minute reprieves from the international banking community based on unfulfilled promises of reform, but inflation began to run at 100 percent per year

and more. The climax came in December 8, 1988, when, for the first time in socialist Yugoslavia, a government lost a vote of confidence in the federal assembly and resigned. The political crisis this unprecedented resignation touched off gave Yugoslavia one final chance for survival, because the man who emerged as prime minister in March 1989, Ante Markovic, proved able to take control of the federal mechanisms and to push through a substantial economic reform. Markovic'’s strategy was to outflank the republics and even the party itself. Former prime minister Branko Mikulic¢ had put forward five reform plans, but all failed because they had to be vetted by the republican presidencies and leaders. Markovic minimized these negotiating steps and went straight to the federal

assembly. He promised that his new ministers, whom he appointed by ability and not primarily by party connections, would henceforth be responsible to the legislature, and he used the assembly’s committee structure to promote his plans. In parliamentary countries this is the normal way governments pursue their legislative programs, but in Yugoslavia Markovic’s maneuvering was a daring—and difficult—innovation. It took the new prime minister most of 1989 to get approval for his plans, but in December of that year the federal parliament passed the most comprehensive and hopeful economic reform Yugoslavia had ever seen.

Markovic was a market-oriented Communist who stressed deregulation, elimination of laws that hindered entry into the market, privatization of small businesses, and creation of capital markets. But to put these ideas into effect, Markovic, just like Balcerowicz and Klaus, first had to get control of the macroeconomic situation, primarily by stopping inflation. Despite a succession of austerity measures, price freezes, and currency manipulations throughout the 1980s, when Markovic took office in March 1989 the rate of inflation was several

hundred percent a year and climbing. By the end of 1989 it reached over two hundred percent a month. Markovic'’s reform, which went into effect on January |, 1990, wrote off all the

contaminated debts produced by the worthless promissory notes that Yugoslav

224 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

firms had been giving each other, thus taking a long step toward getting control of the money supply.5? Markovic made the new “heavy” dinar convertible at seven to the deutschmark, introduced a balanced budget, inaugurated restrictive monetary policies, froze wages for six months, and freed all prices except about 20 percent of the retail prices and 25 percent of industrial production. The results of this shock therapy were spectacular. Inflation dropped precipitously, reaching close to zero after a few months, foreign exchange reserves rose dramatically, and foreign debt declined. Encouraged, foreign investors flocked to Yugoslavia. During 1990 and the first few months of 1991 almost three thousand foreign firms initialed agreements calling for about $1.2 billion of investment in the Yugoslav economy (although little of the money had actually arrived by the time the civil war began). From the foreign point of view, Markovic was a miracle man, clearly the hope of the future for Yugoslavia. Inside Yugoslavia, however, Markovic was increasingly unpopular. Even though he was a Croat, non-Serbs saw him as a centrist Communist trying to impose rules from Belgrade, whereas MiloSevic's supporters reviled him with populist slogans as a man undermining socialism and ruining Yugoslavia on behalf of foreign bankers. Borislav Jovic, a member of the federal presidency and a close ally of Milosevic, called Markovic “a foreign agent’ who advocated the “uncontrolled transfer of social ownership into private hands” and the “sale of property to foreigners for next to nothing.” Joze Pucnik, a leading Slovenian oppositionist, understood that Markovic would never be able to get the feuding republics to agree. He called Markovic “one of the biggest bluffers that ever managed to obtain Europe's support.”6! Despite the apparent initial success of his economic reforms, Markovic’s fatal disability was the same as that of every other federal leader in post-Tito Yugoslavia.

He showed great skill in conceiving his program and in finding a way to get it approved, but no amount of skill was adequate to overcome the unwillingness of some, even all, of the constituent republics to continue an economic program that required restraint. As soon as the six-month freeze on wages expired, workers everywhere demanded increases—and got them. The federal bank's inability to keep track of the money supply reached its climax in December 1990, when Milosevic found a way to divert $1.8 billion, which was half of the entire amount available for the increase in money supply scheduled for 1991, to Serbia's use. He passed some of this enormous amount out in bonuses, wage increases, subsidies,

and interest-free loans in a classic vote-buying spree during the month before Serbia’ s elections in December 1990. Since at that time the dinar was convertible, Serbian banks used these monies to buy foreign currency from the national bank,

thus destroying its solvency and wiping out about $13.6 billion, “the life savings of an entire generation,’ as Michael Palairet puts it.©2 “It may be surmised,’ Palairet comments, “that a large part of the windfall found its way into the hands of the ‘deserving’ servants of the Milosevic regime.” While the Yugoslav economy was collapsing, the glue that had held Yugoslavia

together, the League of Yugoslav Communists, had already disintegrated.©

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 225

Yugoslav Communists were not immune to the forces for change sweeping Eastern Europe, as the changes in Slovenia and Croatia testify. Yet, understandably, many party members could not bring themselves to turn their backs entirely on the past. Thus the draft resolution placed before the special party congress that convened in Belgrade’s Sava Center at MiloSevic's insistence in January 1990 was a muddled document unsuited to the needs of the day. It supported Markovic’s economic reforms but called only for a mixed economy, not for the

creation of a market system. It proposed that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) achieve political legitimacy in the future through free elections, but it did not mention multiparty elections. And it confirmed the Serbian constitutional changes of 1989. These proposals were far too cautious for the Slovenes. They proposed a substitute motion that explicitly advocated a multiparty system, secret ballots, “asymmetric federalism,” and a federal League of Communists made up of separate, independent parties. To make it precisely clear where the Slovenes stood, their proposal pointedly called for the introduction of democracy in Kosova and the abolition of “democratic centralism,” the code word for MiloSevic’s neo-Stalinist methods. MiloSevic rejected the Slovenian amendments out of hand, calling them an invitation to “internecine warfare in the party and the country,” and on the same day the congress voted them down by a wide margin.“ Frustrated and sensing the futility of participating in a party unable to resist MiloSevic, the Slovenes walked out. Two weeks later in Ljubljana they announced the formation of an independent party based on the principles of social democracy (the Party of Democratic Renewal) and withdrew from the LCY.

MiloSevic tried to turn the walkout to his advantage by proposing that the congress continue without the Slovenes, but the delegations from Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina refused, so the congress suspended its meeting without even electing a new leadership. Borba correctly analyzed the significance of these events in its headline the next morning: “The League of Communists no Longer Exists.”65 Ante Markovic bravely maintained that “Yugoslavia continues to function with or without the League of Communists,” but he was wrong. The League of Communists had been what held Yugoslavia together. When it disappeared Yugoslavia could not be far behind.

FREE ELECTIONS IN THE REPUBLICS Slovenia and Croatia were prepared for the disappearance of the League of Yugoslav Communists because they had already scheduled elections to create new governments. The first free parliamentary elections in Yugoslavia since before World War II took place at the same time elections were going on in the rest of

Eastern Europe—April and May 1990. The details are complex but the results were clear. In Slovenia the parties that grew out of the Mladina controversy of 1988 had banded together to form the oppositional alliance called DEMOS (Demokratska opozicija Slovenije—Democratic Opposition of Slovenia). Their

226 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

main opponent was the Party of Democratic Renewal (Stranka demokraicne prenove—SDP), or old Communists. Both parties had superficially similar platforms, which included marketizing reforms and more independence of action for Slovenia in Yugoslavia, but the Party of Democratic Renewal had the sizable disadvantage of having been in power for forty years. Accordingly, the DEMOS took a clear majority of seats in two of the three houses of the legislature and the largest block of seats in the third house. Lojze Peterle, a Christian Democrat and part of the DEMOS alliance, became prime minister on May 16, 1990. In the direct elections for president, however, the former leader of the Communist party, Milan Kuéan, took a runoff with almost 60 percent of the vote. It seemed that the Slovenian voters picked the most democratic-sounding of the available choices without completely rejecting the progressive Communist leadership that had been defending Slovenia’s separate path for the past several years. The outcome in Croatia was quite different. There the Croatian Democratic Union, led by Franjo Tudjman, waged an overtly nationalistic campaign against the Communist party, now renamed the Party of Democratic Changes (Stranka demokratskih promjena—SDP). It was no contest. Describing the Independent State of Croatia, the degenerate fascist state of World War II, as an “expression

of the historical aspirations of the Croatian nation for its independent stare,” Tudjman called for Croatia to be restored within its “historic and natural bound-

aries, advocated the “economic, spiritual and cultural union of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which form a natural, indivisible political unit and are historically destined to be together,’ and asserted, in a manner reminiscent of Todor Zhivkov’s claim about Turks in Bulgaria, that many of Bosnia’s Muslims were in fact ethnic Croats. At the same time he was staking out these claims to a Greater Croatia, Tudjman railed against “Great Serbian hegemonistic desires” and prom-

ised to rectify what he called the overrepresentation by Serbs in the Croatian government, police, and media. The Party of Democratic Changes, on the other hand, supported pluralism (“We are serious” was its slogan), backed Markovic’s painful economic reforms,

and campaigned against nationalism and for the maintenance of Yugoslavia. One of its candidates, Zdravko Tomac, put it this way: “Yugoslavia has to be a federation because 2.2 million Serbs live outside Serbia in other Yugoslav republics. About 1.1 million Croats live outside Croatia. This means that the national question cannot be settled within a single republic, but within Yugoslavia as a federation.” Creation of anything other than a true federation, Tomac said, would mean civil war.*’ Rejecting Tomac’s accurate prediction, Croatian voters gave the Croatian Democratic Union 60 percent of the seats in the Sabor, and at the end of May 1990 Franjo Tudjman became president of Croatia. The other four republics in Yugoslavia joined the electoral bandwagon six months later. In Serbia, MiloSevic had conducted a snap election late in 1989 in which he permitted only his own candidates to run. The quality of this election may be indicated by the fact that just after the polls closed one Belgrade district reported that 102 percent of the registered voters had voted, 92 percent

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 227

of them for MiloSevic.** Still, the genuineness of MiloSevic’s popularity, especially in the countryside, could scarcely be doubted. Legislative elections were finally held late in 1990. Opposition came from the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski pokret obnove—SPO), led by an eccentric writer named Vuk Draskovi¢c, who affected a full beard reminiscent of the Chetniks of World War II, flourished a dramatic cape, and tried to be more nationalistic than Milosevic. At the last minute, ten democratic opposition parties formed a United Serbian Opposition, attempting to do for Serbia what the DEMOS did for Slovenia, but it was too little, too late. MiloSevic’s socialists took 77 percent of the vote while MiloSevi¢ himself swept into the presidency again with 65 percent. Elections took place in the other three republics in December 1990 also. In Montenegro the League of Communists of Montenegro took 66 percent of the vote and its leader, Momir Bulatovic, became president. Bulatovic was a young

and potentially reform-minded Communist, but for the time being he threw Montenegro's weight fully behind Milosevic. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the other hand, three parties representing the three main ethnic groups emerged: the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) representing the Muslim Bosniaks led by Alija Izetbegovic;”? the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) led by the xenophobic Radovan Karadzic; and the Bosnian branch of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). At first these parties agreed to form a coalition government, which they did after surprising themselves with 90 percent of the vote, selecting Izetbegovic

as president. The former Communists, led by Ante Markovic himself, trailed badly with 10 percent and evaporated as a force in Bosnian politics. In Macedonia the victor was the Democratic party for Macedonian National Unity/IMRO. The addition of “IMRO” sent a chill through the Balkans, since it was the acronym of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, a

terrorist organization active in the first half of the twentieth century. A large Albanian minority lives in a compact area of northwestern Macedonia, where they suffered repression at the hands of the Macedonians in the 1980s analogous to that suffered by the Albanians at the hands of Serbs in Kosova. The good

performance of Albanian candidates in the first round of elections generated a sudden interest among Slavic Macedonian voters in the IMRO, which ended up with 31 percent of the seats after the second electoral round. The League of Communists of Macedonia, now the Party for Democratic Transformation, took second place, gathering 26 percent of the seats. The new assembly elected Kiro Gligorov, a reform Communist, as the president of Macedonia. By the end of 1990, therefore, all of the six Yugoslav republics had elected, in more or less free elections, new legislatures and new presidents. Ironically, all of the presidents except Alija Izetbegovic were former Communists, including even Franjo Tudjman. The only important figures in the country who had not been elected were at the federal level. There the federal assembly, the presidency, and of course Prime Minister Ante Markovic himself had all come to office on the basis of the constitution of 1974. Their inability to claim the legitimacy of popular election was a fatal liability in the post-1989 world.

228 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

THE ROAD TO CIVIL WAR From the first free elections in the spring of 1990 it took a little more than a year for Wars of Yugoslav Succession to begin. Three events that took place in July 1990 hinted at the direction in which Yugoslavia was headed. In Serbia, MiloSevic remained unsatisfied with the constitutional changes he had rammed through. Even though his security forces occupied Kosova, forty thousand Albanians still demonstrated in Prishtina in January 1990, and in February the army had to be sent in to quell riots. MiloSevic’s response was to propose a completely rewritten constitution. This one would permit multiparty elections, which he correctly believed he would win, thus outflanking the new but weak democratic opposition, and would tie Kosova and Vojvodina more firmly to the Belgrade center. His first step in this strategy was to calla referendum on two weeks’ notice asking for popular approval to write a new constitution. In reality, MiloSevic was asking for approval to crush Kosova and to pursue his nationalist arguments with Slovenia and Croatia. Just before the vote, he forcibly disbanded the Kosovar legislature, which was still meeting and contained

a majority of ethnically Albanian members, ostensibly in response to strikes and other disturbances but actually to inflame the Serbian electorate. On July 2, 1990, the overwhelming majority of Serbs approved MiloSevic’s aggressive strategy. On the same day 114 members of the Kosovar legislature—all the Albanian

representatives, who had been locked out of their offices—met and declared that Kosova was now fully independent of Serbia and should be considered a constituent republic of Yugoslavia. Within days the Serbian assembly not only rejected the Kosova declaration of independence but “permanently” abolished the Kosova legislature and transferred all its functions to the Serbian assembly in Belgrade. Not to be outdone, the fugitive Albanian legislators convened secretly in September and produced a Constitution of the Republic of Kosova, which, while remaining a dead letter under the new Serbian laws, remained the basis for the continued assertion by Albanian activists that the will of Kosova was to be a republic like the other republics of Yugoslavia. The situation in Kosova remained at an impasse: a small minority of self-righteous Serbs fully in control by force of arms, the large majority of frustrated Albanians dispossessed and hostile. On the same day Serbian voters approved MiloSevic’s policies, the Slovenian Assembly in Ljubljana formally declared Slovenia to be fully sovereign, thus taking the measures already adopted in September 1989 one step further. Slovenia

now asserted that its laws took precedence over those of the federation, that it could control the armed forces on its soil, and that it intended to conduct its own foreign and trade policy. At this point, these actions by the Slovenes remained assertions rather than actualities, but they could now be understood as part of a systematic Slovenian strategy of incremental and orderly dissociation from Yugoslavia. The third July event was the constitutional wording approved by the Tudjman

government on July 25, 1990, when the Croatian Sabor ignored the demands of

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 229

non-Croats to define Croatia as “a state of free peoples” and defined it instead as “the national state of the Croatian nation,” just as Matica hrvatska had proposed twenty years earlier.7! In the eyes of many Serbs inside and outside of Croatia, this changed them from “a constituent people,’ which they were in Yugoslavia, into a “minority, which they considered demeaning.” It was one thing for Slovenia to declare its sovereignty, since it had few ethnic minorities and enjoyed a welldefined border with its neighbors. It was another for Croatia to start defining its new state without making an effort to accommodate its volatile Serbian minority. Tudjman, however, proved unable to work out an accommodation with Serbian representatives and began dismissing Serbian public employees he deemed uncooperative. When he began renaming streets in honor of Ustasha figures, adopted

the ancient Croatian red-and-white checkerboard shield which had been the emblem of the Ustasha regime,’3 and lowered his estimate of the number of Serbs killed by the fascist Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II, the more excitable members of the Serbian minority concluded that Tudjman was preparing genocide against them.”4 The Serbs of Croatia were not a compact group, although a few local government units contained a majority of Serbs. One hundred thousand of them lived in and around Zagreb, were fairly well assimilated, and were led by moderates

who sought a modus vivendi within Croatia. Nevertheless, with the encouragement of MiloSevi¢ and Vuk Draskovic in Belgrade, not to mention some even more extreme fanatics like Vojislav SeSelj, who styled himself a Chetnik, arrayed himself in bandoleers, and talked about killing Croats, leaders of the Serbian minority that lived in the poor mountainous regions of Croatia known as Krajina now began to prepare for the worst. By the end of July 1990 they created the Serbian National Council as their representative body, and in August they undertook a referendum allegedly showing that almost 100 percent of the

people living in the Krajina favored autonomy. Less biased observers noted that the area the Serbs sought to control was only about two-thirds Serbian, the rest being Croats and other nationalities, and that an autonomous Krajina would contain only about one-quarter of the Serbs living in Croatia. But in part because of Franjo Tudjman’s attitude, in part because the radical Milan Babic succeeded in ousting the moderate Jovan RaSskovic as the leader of Krajina, and in part because of considerable encouragement and material support from Serbia, by spring 1991 the Krajina Serbs had unified themselves into a rebellious armed camp. Militant Serbian communities at the other end of Croatia, in Western Slavonia along the Danube River, also began creating their own “autonomous” units. Had this process of Serbian dissociation from Croatia been as peaceful as the previous paragraph makes it sound, Yugoslavia might have survived in some form. But it was far from peaceful. Violence between Croats and Serbs in Croatia escalated. In August 1990, when Croatian police in the town of Benkovac tried

to disarm some Serbian reservists, for example, Serbs barricaded roads and patrolled the streets. From that point on Krajina Serbs began to arm themselves

230 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

with MiloSevic's help, to disrupt communications, and to destroy Croatia's tourist industry with slashed tires, brawls, and worse.75 The number of incidents multiplied, as did the outlandishness of the rumors and the virulence of the hostility. Tudjman called the Serbian actions “an armed uprising,” while in Belgrade Vuk Draskovic¢ called for a “declaration of war” to prevent another Croatian genocide against the Serbs. Meanwhile, the Slovenes continued to put pressure on federal authorities either to reach a reasonable agreement or to resign themselves to losing Slovenia. On December 23, 1990, a large majority of Slovene voters approved a referendum in which they vowed to declare their independence in six months if a satisfactory arrangement could not be reached. In February 1991 the Slovenian assembly began passing enabling laws that would permit them to become independent,

the government made plans to print Slovenian money and open missions abroad, and border guards entered training. In March 1991 the assembly advised Slovenian youths that they could choose to serve in Slovenian territorial defense

units or police instead of answering their conscription calls to the Yugoslav National Army, and in May it announced that Slovenia would “dissociate” from Yugoslavia on June 26, just six months after the referendum of December. The Croats announced they would follow suit. The final humiliation of the federal government came in May 1991 when, by the normal rotation agreement, the Serb Borisav Jovic was to step down as chairman of the presidency and Stipe Mesic, a Croat, was to succeed him. But Mesic¢ promised that once in office he would visit Kosova to investigate the oppressive conditions there. Therefore, instead of routinely approving him, as was the usual practice, Milosevic used the four votes he controlled (Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosova, and Montenegro) to deadlock the eight-member presidency so that the Croat could not achieve a majority. In protest the Croatian and Slovenian delegates to the federal assembly walked out. With only one month to go before the promised Slovenian and Croatian declarations of independence, Yugoslavia found itself with a rump federal legislature and no executive authority. The unknown quantity in this volatile situation was the Yugoslav National Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija—JNA).”° The army was the only remaining Yugoslav institution that seemed to be functioning adequately on a federal basis late in the 1980s. Like all Yugoslav institutions, it has been weakened by the decentralizing impact of the 1974 constitution, but late in the 1980s it reestablished its control over regional interests by subordinating republican territorial defense units to the center. This was well and good, but where was the army supposed to throw its support to further its goal of preserving Yugoslavia? After January 1990 the Communist party had ceased to exist and after the fiasco of the federal government in May 1991, the army lost the last formally Yugoslav institution to which it could lend its support. Its leadership, while conservative, committed to the preservation of Yugoslavia, and hostile to open elections, was at the same time indecisive. In March 1991, for example when an opportunity to seize control of the state through a coup that seemed to be opening, the cautious

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 231

leadership decided not to act. Eventually, the army turned to MiloSevic as the strongest remaining centralizing force. Hope for a rebirth of a new Yugoslavia now rested with the republics. It seemed a good sign, therefore, that in March 1991 the presidents of the six republics began face-to-face weekly meetings at a number of Tito’s old personal retreats

in an effort to stop what everyone conceded was a freight train running out of control. At these meetings the president of Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov, and of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic, acted as mediators between the two basic positions that had divided Serbs and Croats from the time of Bishop Strossmayer and Prince Michael. The first position, proposed by Croatia and Slovenia, was that Yugoslavia should be a voluntary association of sovereign republics.”7 The second, supported by Serbia and Montenegro, was that Yugoslavia be a united state in which the federation exercised control over banks, foreign affairs, secu-

rity, and similar matters. The conferees at first hoped they could conduct a federation-wide referendum to resolve this question, but this proved impossible. Gligorov and Izetbegovi¢ proposed what they called an “asymmetric federation.” But neither MiloSevic, who insisted on retaining the old Yugoslavia and held that the Croats were mistreating Serbs (he never mentioned Serbian mistreatment of Kosovars), nor Tudjman, who complained the Serbs in Croatia were in armed rebellion with MiloSevic’s backing and rejected administrative autonomy for Krajina, would even discuss the proposal. By this time public opinion in both Serbia and Croatia had been completely inflamed by vigorous campaigns of disinformation and propaganda. Each side ran hours of television stories showing mass graves from World War II being dug up and describing the bestial atrocities committed, always by the other side of course, in gruesome detail. On more than one occasion TV stations in Belgrade and Zagreb ran the same clips, each claiming that they showed atrocities committed by the other side. On June 25, 1991, one day before Slovenia had said it would declare independence, the Croats beat them to it. The somewhat miffed Slovenes quickly followed suit. When previously trained Slovene guards moved to take over border posts, the Yugoslav National Army decided to intervene. Miscalculating completely the nature of their opponent, the army apparently believed it could send a few armored columns to the Slovenian border posts and simply occupy them. But the crafty Slovenes expertly blockaded the highways, cutting off the armored columns, while at the same time surrounding and seizing many caches of arms

stored around the country. The Yugoslav military doctrine in case of foreign invasion had been to retreat to the hills and to fight a guerrilla war along the lines

of the partisan effort. Toward this end, the army had stored large amounts of arms in isolated places throughout the country. When the Slovenes seized many of these caches in the first three or four days of the JNA’s operations, they suddenly went from being a weak local militia to being a reasonably well equipped force armed with antitank and armor-piercing weapons. With its columns stalled along the Slovenian highways and the Slovenes capable of destroying a significant

232 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

amount of their armor, the JNA now thought better of its intervention. Within three weeks it had retreated back to Croatia. From that time on Slovenia continued an accelerating process of turning itself into an independent country. In Croatia, on the other hand, the situation went from bad to worse. With the declaration of Croatian independence, the scattered armed confrontations of the first half of 1991 turned into active efforts by a variety of Serbian paramilitary forces and a Serbianized JNA to seize as much of Croatia as they could.’ Young men from within Serbia organized into paramilitary units with names like “Tigers” and “White Eagles” and armed by the MiloSevic government were especially energetic and bloodthirsty, while the poorly armed Croats tried to resist.7? Realizing their weakness, and convinced that the JNA was now siding with Milosevic, in September Croatian forces surrounded the JNA barracks and arms depots Croatia. The JNA leadership responded with an explicit decision to attack and defeat Croatia. The ensuing war had three main theaters. In the east, the JNA, supported by paramilitary irregulars, attacked the town of Vukovar. Even though Vukovar was not strategically important, the Serbs subjected it to a devastating three-month siege. The operation revealed the incompetence of the JNA and the unpopularity of the war among a wide swath of Belgrade youth, while at the same time making Vukovar a powerful symbol of national sacrifice among Croats. It also revealed the lengths to which the most fanatic young Serbian men would go once engaged. When Serbian forces finally seized the devastated Vukovar, for example, they took more than 250 non-Serb occupants of the city hospital to nearby Ovéara and simply massacred them. The JNA then sought to advance on Osijek, from which they hoped to continue deeper into Slavonia, but confronted by aroused Croatian forces, they failed. The second front was spread throughout the Krajina, where Serbian elements overwhelmed Croatian police and solidified their hold on the region. Much of this part of the war consisted of random fire fights, killings, and outrages scattered through many villages and towns. The final front was the famous tourist city of Dubrovnik, where Montenegrin and JNA forces looted the towns surrounding the strategically irrelevant city, subjected it to a siege, and bombarded its priceless antiquities. The Serbo-Croatian war was bloody and mean-spirited. Bitter hatred born of friends killing lifelong friends, of mutilations, of wanton destruction, and of complete economic ruin for hundreds of thousands of refugees so contaminated all the parties that Serbs and Croats have had trouble reconciling themselves ever since.

INTERNATIONAL REACTION After more than forty years at peace, the European Community reacted with shock at the outbreak of brutal warfare almost in its midst, despite the fact that the American intelligence community had predicted in the fall of 1990 that Yugoslavia would collapse within the year.8° This accurate prediction had absolutely no impact, not only on the EU, but even in the United States. At the

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 233

very last minute, Secretary of State James A. Baker had visited Belgrade in an effort to calm the situation, but his incompatible pieces of advice—to proceeded democratically but at the same time preserve the unity of Yugoslavia—were too little, too uninformed, and too late. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the resultant diminution of Yugoslavia’s strategic significance, the George H. W. Bush administration saw nothing but trouble in a confusing and emotional war. The European Community, on the other hand, with the surprisingly easy unification of Germany completed by the fall of 1990 and the creation of the new European Union impending, was feeling confident. As one European diplomat put it, “This is the hour of Europe, not of America.”! Their first attempt to deal with a crisis they did not understand was to call the parties together on Tito’s old island getaway, Brioni. Ignoring Prime Minister Markovic's efforts to hold Yugoslavia together, thereby almost casually giving up their last chance to prevent Yugoslavia’s collapse, the Europeans got Slovenia and Croatia to delay implementing their independence for 90 days and congratulated themselves on ending the war in Slovenia, although they had nothing to do with the

JNA withdrawal. In September the United Nations Security Council jumped in, declared an arms embargo on all parties, not realizing (or caring) that this move greatly favored the Serbian forces who were receiving the bulk of the JNA arms. Finally, the Europeans convened a “Conference on Yugoslavia,’ headed by the experienced British diplomat Peter Lord Carrington. Despite truce after

truce being immediately broken, by October Carrington came up with a plan that was accepted by all parties—except Serbia. MiloSevic refused to consider any scheme in which Serbs in Croatia would be considered a minority. Finally, early in 1992, former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance negotiated a truce, and in February the first of ten thousand blue-helmeted United Nations peace keeping troops (United Nations Protective Force—UNPROFOR) began arriving to keep

the Serbs and Croats apart. This stopped the fighting, but because by that time Serbian forces had occupied about one-third of Croatia, it left Serbian gains in place, at least for the time being.

One other important step the Europeans took was to settle the legal status of the disintegrated Yugoslavia. The Conference on Yugoslavia appointed an ad hoc advisory commission consisting of five constitutional judges headed by the head of the French Constitutional Council, Robert Badinter, to tie up legal issues. In November 1991 the Badinter Commission determined that Yugoslavia “was in a process of dissolution” and that the borders of any new states had to conform to the old republican borders. This meant that Yugoslavia no longer existed and each of its elements would have to consolidate itself and seek international recognition, even Serbia/Montenegro, which continued to use the name Yugoslavia.

Next the commission was asked if any of the republics had met certain standards for formal diplomatic recognition. It duly reported that Macedonia and Slovenia had, but Croatia and Bosnia had not. Nevertheless, on January 15, 1992,

the European Union formally recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, but not Macedonia. This strange result was more the work of European

234 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

politics than of the war itself. For almost a year prior to this decision, Christian Democratic governments, beginning with the Netherlands, had discussed recognizing Croatia.82 By the end of 1991, even before the Badinter Commission reported, the German Foreign Minister took the lead and announced, against the advice of many international leaders, including Lord Carrington and the Secretary General of the United Nations, that Germany was about to recognize Croatia along with Slovenia. Eventually he prevailed. Macedonia was forgotten.

THE WAR IN BOSNIA The Serbo-Croatian war was awful. The war in Bosnia was beyond awful. Bosnia and Herzegovina (called simply Bosnia here) was the most ethnically mixed of

the Yugoslav republics. The largest group, about 48 percent of the population, consisted of Muslims, or Bosniaks as they became known. These descendants of people who either converted or immigrated centuries earlier during the Ottoman era speak the language called Serbo-Croatian at the time, but because of their religion and culture, they consider themselves a separate people. Serbs constituted about 37 percent of the population of Bosnia and Croats about 14 percent. None of these three groups lived in ethnically compact regions that could be encompassed by any rational border. Bosnia was like the skin of a leopard, Alija Izetbegovic said, with each spot a different group.®3 Serbian and Croatian nationalists both claimed that Bosnia should be theirs,

and, according to Stipe Mesi¢, Presidents Tudjman and Milosevic had decided between themselves to partition it. Their plotting had no effect, but the Bosnian Serbs, under the unbalanced leadership of Radovan Karadzic, head of the Serbian Democratic party (Srpska demokratska stranka—SDS), became increasingly unwilling to accept living in a Bosnian state in which Serbs had to cooperate with the Bosniaks and Croats. Serbs “cannot live with other nations,” Karadzic told American Ambassador Warren Zimmerman in 1992. “They must have their own existence. They are a warrior race and they can trust only themselves to take by force what is their due.”84 With the encouragement of Slobodan MiloSevic, Karadzic began a propaganda campaign against Izetbegovic, whom he falsely accused of being a Muslim fundamentalist. By raising the issue in this way the Bosnian Serbs brought back primitive memories of the Ottoman period, which Serbian tradition characterizes one of bloody oppression. In October 1991, at the height of the Serbo-Croatian war, the Bosnian parliament, dominated by Croatian and Bosniak representatives, adopted a Memorandum of Sovereignty, by which it stated that it preferred Bosnia become independent rather than remain part of MiloSevic’s Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Serbs responded by creating their own legislature and conducting a plebiscite showing that they preferred remaining part of Yugoslavia. In January and February 1992, they went further and established what they called the Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia Herzegovina, later shortened to Republika srpska, and adopted their own constitution. At the same time, MiloSevi¢ was taking steps to turn over most of the arms and much

CHAPTER 6 « The Devil's Finger 235

of the personnel of the JNA in Bosnia to Serbian elements. While Serbian leaders became increasingly hostile to cooperating in a multinational Bosnia, Izetbegovic

refused to concede that Serbs might deserve any special autonomy in the new state. Twenty years later, this impasse remained the defining characteristic of Bosnian politics.

At this point, the Badinter Commission provided its last opinion, namely, that whereas it could not recommend international recognition for Bosnia because the government in Sarajevo did not control the Serbian portions of the country, “this assessment could be reviewed if appropriate guarantees were provided, possibly by means of a referendum of all the citizens.”85 This was a contradictory judgment, since it was clear by that time that Serbs would not tolerate a vote for Bosnian independence. Nevertheless, Alija Izetbegovi¢ believed that the international community would come to Bosnia’s rescue. He reluctantly decided to hold the referendum. At the end of February 63.4 percent of eligible voters turned out and almost 100 percent of them voted for independence. In other words, over half the population of Bosnia approved declaring independence.* But the Serbs boycotted the vote, which they claimed was illegitimate. Nevertheless, Izetbegovic proclaimed Bosnia’s independence two days after the vote. After a month of last ditch diplomatic wrangling, including a feasible proposal to separate Bosnia into ten ethnic cantons that Izetbegovic ultimately rejected, on April 6 and 7, 1992,

the European Union and the United States formally recognized Bosnian independence. Two days later Serbian forces attacked the border town of Zvornik, which was about 60 percent Muslim, quickly taking it. Within four months the Serbians killed or expelled all of the Muslim inhabitants and destroyed its many mosques. Zvornik’s new Serbian mayor declared, “There never were any mosques in Zvornik.”87 The war that added the term “ethnic cleansing” to the vocabulary of barbarism had begun.®8 And finally there was Kosova, the initial focal point. The Kosovars remained remarkably restrained in the face of extreme provocations by the Serbs, perhaps because they were poorly armed and knew that the Serbs would not hesitate to massacre them. But with unemployment in the 40 percent range, with education at a standstill, and with no governmental functions reserved for them, it seemed certain that Kosova would not remain quiet for long. Together with their conationals in Albania and other parts of Yugoslavia, the Albanians constituted a population of about five and one-half million, more than the Croats and almost three times numerous as the Slovenes. How long could it be before they attempted to assert that position in the Balkans to which ethnic politics seemed to entitle them?

NOTES 1. The literature on Yugoslavia and its collapse has grown to enormous proportions. For an excellent guide see Jasna Dragovic-Soso, “Why did Yugoslavia Collapse? An Overview of Contending Explanations,” in State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration, ed. Lenard J. Cohen and

236 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2008), 1-39, and the literature cited therein; Sabrina P. Ramet provides a review of almost 150 studies in her Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); the two most important general histories of Yugoslavia are John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). An excellent study of the collapse itself remains Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin, 1997, Rev. ed. and updated); while Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars’ Initiative, ed. Charles Ingrao and Thomas

A. Emmert (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2008) brings together a huge team of international scholars to confront some of the main issues. See also Sabrina P. Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milosevic, 4th ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002). For individual countries, see Andrew Rossos, Macedonia and the Macedonians (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2008); Branka Magas, Croatia Through History: The Making of a European State (London: Saqi Books, 2008); Marko Attila Hoare, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Saqi Books, 2007); Tim Judah, Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); Rudolf Martin

Rizman, Uncertain Path: Democratic Transition and Consolidation in Slovenia (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2006); and Florian Bieber, ed., Montenegro in Transition: Problems of Identity and Statehood (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003). 2. Stojan Cerovi¢c in Vreme, March 4, 1991, from FBIS EEU-91-051, March 15, 1991, 51. John Lampe reported that a friend in Yugoslavia put it this way: “Only the devil’s own

plan could have designed what we are now doing to ourselves, destroying in a few days what took decades, even centuries to build” (“Yugoslavia from Crisis to Tragedy,” East European Studies Newsletter, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., November-December 1991). 3. The Slavic languages include Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. The major non-Slavic languages of Eastern Europe include Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, and Albanian. The major non-Slavic languages among minorities are Yiddish, Turkish, and Romany. The Baltic languages (Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian) are not Slavic languages. 4. Foradiscussion of challenges to this traditional view, see Jonathan Kwan, “Nationalism and all that: Reassessing the Habsburg Monarchy and its Legacy,” European History Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2011): 88-108. 5. Milorad Ekmeci¢, Ratni ciljevi Srbije 1914 [Serbian War Aims in 1914] (Belgrade: Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1973), 88-89.

6. For an excellent discussion of this period see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). 7. The Croatian Sabor (legislature) declared Croatia independent and joined forces with

the National Council early in November, making Croatia independent for about a month in 1918. This had the effect of legitimizing the council’s accession to the new Yugoslav state.

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 237 8. At the time of unification Aleksandar was technically prince regent for his father, King Petar, but he had acted as ruler in fact since 1914. 9. For the violent character of the early Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, see Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, 46-51, 58-60. 10. Herzegovina is the southwest portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina around the Neretva River. Its name derives from Herzog, the German term for “duke,” but today simply denotes a geographical region. 11. The Serbian word for the region whose capital city today is Prishtina (Pristina, in Serbian) is Kosovo, with the accent on the first syllable (KO-sovo). The Albanian word for it is Kosova, with the accent on the second syllable (kos-OV-a). Because Kosova is now an independent state, I use that spelling, except where the context requires otherwise. 12. Fora brief and balanced discussion of the Ustasha, including good estimates on how many Serbs and other persons died in Yugoslavia during World War II, see Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 102-127. The standard work on the occupation is Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). See also Sabrina P. Ramet, ed., The Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945 (London: Routledge, 2007).

13. Note that related struggles in Macedonia, Kosova, and Montenegro added to the complexity of the wartime situation. 14. Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 15. Dijana Plestina, Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia. Success, Failure, and Consequences (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992).

16. Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948-1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 139. 17. See April Carter, Democratic Reform in Yugoslavia: The Changing Role of the Party (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Steven L. Burg, Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision Making since 1966 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). 18. Carter, Democratic Reform in Yugoslavia, 19. 19. Burg, Conflict and Cohesion, 81.

20. Prof. Dr. Mihailo Djuri¢, speaking at the law faculty discussion of proposed constitutional amendments in March 1971, quoted by DuSan BilandZzic¢, Ideje i praksa

drustvenog razvoja Jugoslavije [Ideas and Practice: The Social Development of Yugoslavia] (Belgrade: Komunist, 1973), 287-288. The 1971 discussion at the Belgrade Law Faculty was so volatile that the journal containing the discussion was banned (it was reprinted in 1990) and some faculty members were removed (Robert M. Hayden,

“Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia,’ in Memory, History, and Opposition, ed. Rubie S. Watson [Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1994], 167-184).

21. Quoted by Burg, Conflict and Cohesion, 107. 22. “Matica” is difficult to translate. Literally it means “queen bee,” but it has overtones of being the basis of something, of being fundamental. Nationalists might think of “Matica hrvatska” meaning something like “the institutional home of the Croatian national culture and spirit.”

238 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 23. Note that the phrase “the sovereign national state of the Croatian nation” would be offensive to the 600,000 Serbian citizens of Croatia. 24. National Intelligence Estimate 31-2-33, September 7, 1955, in Yugoslavia: From “National Communism’ to National Collapse: US Intelligence Community Estimative Products on Yugoslavia, 1948-1999 (Washington, D.C.: National Intelligence Council, 2006), 211.

25. The Yugoslav growth rate in the 1950s was about 7.5 percent per year, about onethird of which can be accounted for by aid from the United States (Bogdan Denitch, Limits and Possibilities: The Crisis of Yugoslav Socialism and State Socialist Systems [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 137). 26. Quoted by Desimir Tochitch, “Titoism without Tito,” Survey 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1984): 16.

27. For a succinct discussion of the Yugoslav economy as “polycentric etatism” with the same problems as other socialist states, see Evan Kraft, “Yugoslavia 1986-88: Transition to Crisis,” in Crisis and Reform in Eastern Europe, ed. Ferenc Fehér and Andrew Arato (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 455-480. 28. Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 83-84. Lydall

cites numerous other equally appalling examples. See also Kraft, “Yugoslavia 1986-88,” 471; and Michael Palairet, “The Inter-Regional Struggle for Resources and the Fall of Yugoslavia,” in State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe, ed. Cohen and Dragovic-Soso, 224-225. 29. Kraft, “Yugoslavia 1986-88,” 471. 30. Estimates of the dead ranged from Senator Jesse Helms’s propagandistic estimate of sixteen hundred to the probably too low official figure of nine (Elez Biberaj, “The conflict in Kosovo,” Survey 28, no. 3 [Autumn 1984]: 50). 31. For a good discussion of the scanty historical sources for this battle, which contemporaries barely knew happened and did not know who won, and of the creation of the legend, see Thomas A. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (New York: East European Monographs, 1990). 32. Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: NYU Press, 1999). 33. This paragraph is based on Ivo Zani¢, “Origins of Political Rhetoric Traced,” a series of articles in Polet, April-May 1989, reprinted in JPRS-EER-89-092, August 17, 1989, 28-44. An example of a ten syllable epic slogan quoted by Zani¢ is Oj, Srbijo / Sto ti lome krila. / Nisu smeli / dok si jaka bila (Oh Serbia, / Why have they broken your wings? / They didn't dare / while you were strong). Here is a contemporary poetic description of MiloSevi¢ arriving at Kosovo polje in April 1987: “But the handsome speaker arrives. / The setting sun sets his bristling hair on fire.” 34. For the 1953 figure, see George W. Hoffman and Fred Warner Neal, Yugoslavia and the New Communism (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962), 31. 35. Says Serbian writer Milan Komnenic, “Kosovo is Serbia, and that is the way it has to be. If 20 some have fallen, tomorrow 20 times as many and 400 times as many must fall. We have to defend every foot of our territory, every foot of our spirituality.... This is the cherished center of our spirituality and our entire identity.” Quoted in JPRS-EER-89-112, October 12, 1989, 19. 36. Mark Baskin, “Crisis in Kosovo,” Problems of Communism 32 (March-April 1983): 65. 37. Paulin Kola, The Myth of Greater Albania (New York: NYU Press, 2003).

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 239 38. See Julie Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 91-212. 39. Jasna Dragovic-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 138. 40. The following relies heavily on Dragovi¢-Soso, Saviours of the Nation. 41. An excerpt from the Memorandum can be found in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 275-280. For a full version, along with expla-

nations of their intentions by two of the main authors, see Kosta Mihailovic and Vasilije Kresti¢, Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: Answers to Criticisms (Belgrade: SANU, 1995). 42. For a first rate analysis of the Memorandum as a reaction to the Yugoslav situation, see Audrey Helfant Budding, “Systemic Crisis and National Mobilization. The Case

of the ‘Memorandum of the Serbian Academy” in Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk, Harvard Ukrainian Studies special volume, XXII (1998): 49-69. 43. Quoted by Ivo Banac, “Yugoslavia: The Fearful Asymmetry of War,” Daedalus 121, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 150. See also the same author’s “Political Change and National Diversity,’ Daedalus 119, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 141-159; and “Post-Communism as Post-Yugoslavism: The Yugoslav Non-Revolutions of 1989-1990,” in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 168-187. These three articles provide a pungent and authoritative analysis of the Yugoslav situation in the late 1980s.

44. Slobodan Stankovic,” The Serbian Academy’s Memorandum,” RFE, Yugoslav SR/11, November 20, 1986, 11. As Michael Palairet has shown, however, exactly the opposite was the case. During the 1980s Serbia was able to extract considerable surplus funds from the other republics, especially Slovenia and Macedonia (“The Inter-Regional Struggle for Resources,” 221-248). 45. Foran excellent discussion of the personality of MiloSevi¢ and his family, especially of Mira Markovic, the wife who had such an influence on him, see Louis Sell, Slobodan Milosevié and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992) 169-194. Sell believes MiloSevi¢ was a “malignant narcissist”’—an emotionally frigid individual who was so strongly self-centered that he believed his own wants and visions to be the truth, whatever the facts. See also Slavoljub Djuki¢, Milosevié and Markovic: A Lust for Power (Montreal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 46. These descriptive phrases are taken from Gale Stokes, “Independence and the Fate of Minorities, 1991-92,” in Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies, ed. Ingrao and Emmert, 95. 47. Dragisa Pavlovic, Olako obeéana brzina [Lightly Promised Speed] (Zagreb, Croatia: Globus, 1988), 308-309. 48. This quotation, as well as some biographical details in this paragraph, is taken from an excellent sketch of MiloSevi¢ and the Serbian situation just before the outbreak of the civil war in Stephen Engelberg, “Carving out a Greater Serbia,” New York Times Magazine, September 1, 1991. For a description of the April 4 events and an interesting formal talk by Milosevic the next day, see FBIS-EEU-87-080, April 27, 1987.

240 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 49. For a fascinating blow by blow account of MiloSevic’s coup, see Silber and Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, 37-47.

50. Magas quotes an article by three Milosevic supporters, including the former Praxis philosopher Mihailo Markovic, which claimed that the majority of Albanians were irredentists who wanted to set up an independent “bourgeois society governed by a pro-fascist right wing regime” (“Yugoslavia: The Spectre of Balkanization,” New Left Review, 174 [1989]: 14).

51. See Carole Rogel, “Slovenia’s Independence: A Reversal of History,” Problems of Communism 40 (July-August 1991): 31-40. 52. Miha Kovac, “The Slovene Spring,” New Left Review 171 (1988): 115-128. For a firstrate analysis see Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Chapter 4, in her ‘Saviours of the Nation, entitled “Serbs and Slovenes: “National Interests’ in Conflict, 1980-1988,” on which the following paragraph is based. 53. For the programs of these parties as well as others, including the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), see JPRS-EER-89-077, July 7, 1989, 21-48.

54. They used the title “Majniska deklaracija,” invoking by that archaic form the May Declaration of 1917, in which Slovenian and Croatian deputies to the Austrian assembly called for the creation of a separate South Slavic unit in the Habsburg Empire (FBIS-EEU-89-096, May 19, 1989, 58-60). 55. Milan Andrejevich, “Slovenia’s Alternative Political Groups,” RFE, Yugoslav SR/12, December 23, 1988, 15-19. 56. Milan Andrejevich, “Slovenia’s Alternative Political Groups,” RFE, Yugoslav SR/3, February 24, 1989, 23.

57. Milan Andrejevich, “The Spectrum of Political Pluralism in Yugoslavia,” RFE, Yugoslav SR/3, February 24, 1989, 4. 58. Keesing’s, 36,900.

59. The most famous case concerned the failure of Agrokomerc, a huge company in Bosnia that left close to $1 billion of worthless notes behind. On trial for “counterrevolutionary activities,” the director of Agrokomerc defended himself by arguing that what he was doing was common Yugoslav business practice. 60. Markovic’s estimate, FBIS-EEU-91-072, April 15, 1991. 61. For Jovic’s remark, see FBIS-EEU-91-062, April 1, 1991; for Pucnik’s remark, see FBIS-EEU-91-060, March 28, 1991; and for further criticism by Jovic, see FBIS-EEU91-056, March 22, 1991. 62. Palairet, “Resources and the Fall of Yugoslavia,” 243. 63. See Dennison Rusinow, “To be or not to be?” in Rusinow, Yugoslavia: Oblique Insights and Observations, 315-340. 64. Keesing’s, 37,122.

65. The Fourteenth Congress reconvened in May 1990, but without the Slovenian, Croatian, or Macedonian representatives. Its call for a Fifteenth Congress, to meet in September, went unanswered.

66. Quotations from Elections in Central and Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1990), 76. 67. CSCE report, Elections in Central and Eastern Europe, 74. 68. According to the East European Newsletter of March 24, 1990. 69. Sabrina Ramet argues that “the 1987 coup by Slobodan MiloSevi¢ represented, among other things, the victory of the countryside over the city in Serbia” (“Nationalism and the ‘Idiocy’ of the Countryside in the Case of Serbia,” in her Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia at Peace and at War [Zurich and Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008], 77).

CHAPTER 6 « The Devils Finger 241 70. For a sketch of Izetbegovi¢c showing how exaggerated, even mistaken, the Serbian

claims that Izetbegovi¢ was a Muslim fundamentalist were, see Gale Stokes “Independence and the Fate of Minorities,” in Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies, ed. Ingrao and Emmert, 87-92. 71. Robert M. Hayden, “Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics,” The Slavic Review 51 (1992): 657. Slovenia and Macedonia introduced similar phrases into their constitutions. Serbia did not, but eliminated any provisions for self-rule in Kosova and Vojvodina and in fact ran a strictly Serbian government. For an excellent

discussion of the structural weaknesses of Croatian political culture that hindered a pluralistic response in 1990, see Vesna Pusi¢, “A Country by Any Other Name: Transition and Stability in Croatia and Yugoslavia,’ East European Polities and Societies 6, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 242-259.

72. For the importance of this distinction, see Gale Stokes, “Independence and the Fate of Minorities,” in Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies, ed. Ingrao and Emmert, 82-113.

73. The traditional symbol extant since early modern times that appears on both the Ustasha and the new Croatian flags is a red and white checkerboard. On the flag of the wartime fascist state the upper left square of the checkerboard is white, whereas on the flag of today’s Croatia the upper left square is red. The latter design was also used during the Communist period. Nevertheless, many Serbs chose to be offended by Tudjman’s use of the design. 74. The term “genocide” came easily to Serbian lips and pens during the MiloSevic era.

Historians in particular have used it regularly, not just when referring to the murders perpetrated by the Independent State of Croatia during World War II, where it is justified, but as the appropriate general term describing Croatian relations toward Serbs in Croatia over a hundred-year history. In 1989, when an assistant at Belgrade University was found to have published in 1971 a remark critical of the Serbian minority in Croatia in the nineteenth century, for example, he was fired to prevent him from spreading “the ideology of genocide” (FBIS-EER-90-023, February 21, 1990, 15). Dragoljub Zivojinovi¢ and Dejan LuCié see the criticisms of Serbs by Catholics in Croatia on the occasion of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 as “preparations for genocide” (Varvarstvo u ime Hristovo [Barbarism in Christ's Name] [Belgrade: Nova knjiga, 1988], 52-54).

75. For confirmation of the considerable influence exercised by MiloSevic in the radicalization and arming of the Krajina Serbs, see the testimony of Milan Babic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), summarized in Sabrina P. Ramet, “Martyr in his own Mind: The Trial and Tribulations of Slobodan MiloSevic,” in her Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, 120-125. 76. Florian Bieber, “The Role of the Yugoslav People’s Army in the Dissolution of Yugoslavia: The Army without a State?” in State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe, ed. Cohen and Dragovic-Soso, 301-332. 77. Dejan Jovi¢, “The Slovenian-Croatian Confederal Proposal: A Tactical Move or an Ultimate Solution?” in State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe, ed. Cohen and Dragovic-Soso, 249-280. 78. Branka Magas, ed., The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1991-95 (London: Frank Cass, 2001); Mile Bijelac and Ozren Zunec, “The War in Croatia, 1991-1995,” in Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies, ed. Ingrao and Emmert, 231-270. 79. Contemporary accounts include Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin, 1992), and Mark Thompson, A Paper House: The

242 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Ending of Yugoslavia (New York: Pantheon, 1992). For the story of the psychopathic leader of one of the paramilitary groups, “The Tigers,” see Christopher S. Stewart, Hunting the Tiger: The Fast Life and Violent Death of the Balkans’ Most Dangerous Man (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008). 80. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 15-90, October 18, 1990, in Yugoslavia: From “National Communism’ to National Collapse, 656. As early as September 1979 an NIE had suggested that “no amount or kind of Western support can... prevent Yugoslavia’s

constituent nationalities from embarking on a civil war, if they are determined to do so” (“National Communism” to National Collapse, 575). For a discussion of these estimates and others, see Gale Stokes “American National Intelligence Estimates on Yugoslavia” in 125 Years of Diplomatic Relations between the USA and Serbia, ed. Ljubinka Trgovéevi¢ (Belgrade: Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, 2008), 172-187. “The bottom line is this,” I conclude: “The National Intelligence Estimates on Yugoslavia provided accurate information and balanced analysis, but their impact on policy makers was slight” (187).

81. Jacques Poos, as quoted by John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003),

282. James Gow characterizes this statement as “much derided” (Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War |New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 48).

82. Germany has often been blamed for what some see as the premature recognition of Croatia, but Norbert Both has convincingly argued that recognition had long been brewing among European Christian Democrats. See his From Indifference to Entrapment: The Netherlands and the Yugoslav Crisis, 1990-1995 (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2000). See also Daniele Conversi, German-Bashing and the Breakup of Yugoslavia, Donald Treadgold Papers No. 16 (Seattle: University of Washington, 1998).

83. For a graphic representation of the ethnic mix of Bosnia, see the map in Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993), 226-227. 84. Warren Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 1999), 203.

85. Conference on Yugoslavia Arbitration Commission, Opinion No. 4, in B. G. Ramcharan, ed., The International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia: Official

Papers, Vol. 2 (The Hague, Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 1997), 1265-1268. 86. Note, however, that many Croats in Herzegovina voted for independence in the expectation that this would clear the decks for them to leave Bosnia and join Croatia. 87. Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia, 14, quoting Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 3.

88. The attack on Zvornik was not the first Serbian action. It was preceded by many armed skirmishes starting early in April.

CHAPTER 7

a,

The New European Order

B’ the late summer of 1989, it had become clear to some, although certainly

not all, that important changes were occurring in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Hungary. But no one grasped how fundamental the changes were about to become. Writing in September and October of that year, after Hungary had opened its borders and after a Solidarity government had come to power in Poland, one of the best informed and most acute analysts of the region, Mark Kramer, was willing to suggest that “a drastic shift to the “Finlandization’ of Eastern Europe (or at least parts of it)...can no longer be ruled out. Nevertheless,” Kramer continued, “the obstacles to radical change in Soviet-East European relations are formidable.”! Shortly after Kramer wrote these words, the completely unexpected collapse of the Wall in Berlin, followed within ten days by the outbreak of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and shortly thereafter by the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu, unhinged everyone's assumptions. For forty years international relations in Europe had been based on the division of the continent into two competing blocs facing each other over a divided Germany. Now, suddenly, the East European marchlands of the Soviet empire, considered by most Westerners as fundamental to the cold war arrangements, were turning their backs on the motherland of revolution. Worse, within less than a year the unification of Germany jumped from the realm of boiler-plate rhetoric to actuality. Even more surprising, during 1990 the stability of the USSR itself began to come into question. Not only was the Warsaw Pact, supposedly the bulwark of its security in Europe, now obsolete, but as 1990 and 1991 unfolded, nationalism reared its head across the republics, even in Russia itself, and the Soviet economy crashed. After an abortive effort by conservative forces to stop the bleeding failed, on Christmas Day 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the second great superpower, the possessor of thousands of nuclear weapons, and the béte noir of the Western world for more than seventy years, slipped peacefully into the night.

243

244 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

These two events, the consolidation of the most powerful state in Europe, Germany, and the disappearance of the most powerful state in Eurasia, the USSR, completely changed the geopolitical situation confronting the newly freed East European countries. Equally important, and perhaps in the long run more important, was a third development, the growth to maturity of the European Union that took place at just the moment of communism’s collapse. When Vaclav Havel spoke of a “return to Europe,” he was not speaking of the Europe of 1945, the 1930s, or even of 1900 or the Enlightenment, but rather of a Europe of which the eastern countries had never been a part, the Europe that had recreated itself since World War II into a uniquely peaceful, democratic, and diverse economic powerhouse. The newly integrated structures of the European Union, buttressed by an alphabet soup of other transnational formations, solidified around a demo-

cratic and prosperous Germany and no longer threatened by the Soviet Union,

constituted the structural foundations of the new European order to which Eastern Europe now aspired.

GERMAN UNIFICATION The fall of the Berlin wall on the night of November 9-10, 1989, came ata moment

of complete confusion for the Communist leaders of East Germany. Two days earlier the government headed by Willy Stoph had resigned and on November 8 the entire politburo had followed. When the special session of the central committee that had been underway when the Wall fell adjourned on November 10, the departing committee members were well aware that “a revolutionary movement has sent in motion a process of serious upheaval,” as their statement put it. At this point, however, they still hoped to regenerate themselves though an “action program” that included provisions for increased democratization and the creation of a “socialist planned economy guided by market conditions.”2 The partys most prominent reform figure, Hans Modrow, took office as the new prime minister. It quickly became apparent that the time for proposals that would have been considered daring in 1985 had passed. Within weeks newspapers were publishing pictures of the comfortable homes party leaders had built themselves in their private suburb of Wandlitz. Not luxurious by Western standards, these homes, with their special stores, large rooms, and swimming pools, scandalized an East German public that lived in tiny high-rise apartments far from decent stores and with doubtful plumbing. Newspaper articles exposed a trade union chief who had set aside five thousand acres of a national forest for his own hunting grounds, where he was alleged to have shot as many as one hundred elk a year. By mid-January not only had a number of party figures been forced to resign over stories such as these, but dozens of formerly high party members were under indictment for corruption. Even Erich Honecker was indicted for ordering border guards to shoot to kill.

The most direct target of public hatred was the Stasi, the Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service—formally the Ministry for State Security [MfS]).4

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 245

The extent to which the Stasi had corrupted East German society with its surveillance is truly remarkable. When its files were opened to public perusal in 1992, it was revealed that in a country of seventeen million people the Stasi had maintained files on six million persons, amassing 125 shelf miles of information, most of it amazingly trivial. Here, for example, is part of a surveillance report from the files: “Rathenow then crossed the street and ordered a sausage at the sausage stand. The following conversation took place: Rathenow: ‘A sausage please. Sausage seller: “With or without roll?’ Rathenow: ‘With, please.’ Sausage seller: ‘And mustard?’ Rathenow: ‘Yes, with mustard. Further exchange of words did not take place.”5 When the Berlin Wall fell, Stasi officers realized they would soon be threatened by an aroused public. Within weeks they began shredding and burning documents, to the extent that they ran out of shredding machines and had to cross over to West Berlin to buy more.°

When citizens saw smoke emerging from Stasi buildings, indicating that records were being burned, they often became enraged, demonstrating and entering the buildings, even putting Stasi officers under house arrest. Prime Minister Modrow’s first response to these outbursts was simply to change the Stasi's name, saying it remained an important aspect of German security. But in Berlin, dissidents, now formed into a fledgling roundtable on the Polish and Hungarian models, demanded the Stasi's abolition. Even the hitherto docile Volkskammer (parliament) agreed. Finally, in mid-January 1990, responding to increasingly chaotic conditions, Modrow gave in, although not before an emotional crowd attacked the Stasi's main headquarters in Berlin and threw a blizzard of formerly secret documents out the windows. The Stasi was finished, although many of its officials managed to slip into private life, sometimes taking ill-gotten gains with them. Continued gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people in Leipzig in the first post-Wall month, outbursts of violence by skinhead toughs, and continued emigration at the rate of two thousand persons a day caused David Binder of the New York Times to remark, “There is the smell of anarchy in the air.’7 But there was also the smell of something else in the air too: unification. Despite the assertions of both party leader Egon Krenz and Prime Minister Modrow that a newly democratic East Germany could be built on the basis of neutrality and socialism, everyone else recognized that the European geopolitical situation that had been locked in concrete for forty years had suddenly cracked open.’ As Anatoly S. Chernyaev, one of Gorbachev's closest advisors, put it on November 10, “The Berlin Wall has collapsed. An entire era in the history of the socialist system is over....It has to do not only with ‘socialism, but with the shift in the world balance of powers. This is the end of Yalta.”® Gorbachev quickly contacted the main Western leaders proposing a four power summit to deal with a “chaotic situation with unpredictable consequences,’ but President George H. W. Bush remained

cautious, not willing to “dance on the wall,” as he put it.0 The West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who over the next year became the prime mover behind unification, was taken off guard initially (he was visiting Poland when the Wall

246 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

fell) but he quickly and accurately took the pulse of the East German public. On November 28, encouraged by some back channel information from Soviet sources and without informing other Western leaders, he came out forthrightly for unification with a ten-point program calling for a new confederal relationship within a broad European context. “Nobody knows how a reunified Germany will look,” he said. “But I am sure that unity will come if it is wanted by the German nation.”!! Forced to consider the new situation, the ambassadors of the four powers that still technically occupied Berlin (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France) met to consider the future of the city and, by extension, of Germany. For the first time since the 1940s, the international community began seriously to contemplate the unification it was on record as favoring but that it had long avoided and feared. In East Germany the Communists were simply unable to cope with events of this magnitude. Within two weeks of the fall of the Berlin Wall they entered

into roundtable talks with the opposition to find a way out. But what opposition? The New Forum, which hoped to be the equivalent in East Germany of the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, had only been formed in September and had no leader of the stature of Lech Watesa or Vaclav Havel. Many other candidates for the mantle of people's representative competed with them. By the time of the second roundtable meeting in mid-December eleven opposition groups joined three churches and five parties from the former National Front in discussions

with the Communist party, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism. In less than two months these heterogeneous negotiations led to the creation, on February 5, 1990, of a government of national responsibility that could with some

justice be considered representative of the new situation. Eight new ministers without portfolios joined their Communist colleagues and began the demeaning but increasingly inevitable task of dissolving their country. For the Soviets the fall of the Wall, even the possibility of a unified Germany, was not necessarily inconsistent with Gorbachev's overarching strategy of creating acommon European home. But the new situation did call into question long-

standing security arrangements. The core Soviet military alliance in Eastern Europe was the Warsaw Pact, which was less a mutual defense system than a series of bilateral arrangements between the Soviet Union and each of the Warsaw Pact members in support of Soviet objectives. Facing the Warsaw Pact was the North

Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949 as the West’s security guarantee against possible Soviet aggression on the continent. The focal point of both systems was East Germany, where 380,000 Soviet troops and their 220,000 dependents had been stationed for many years.!? If East Germany united with West Germany and became part of NATO, as the United States wanted, the longstanding first line of Soviet defense against German revanchism, as the Soviets liked to call it, would be eliminated. NATO would also be strengthened, perhaps beyond the ability of the Soviets to check its expansion into Eastern Europe. And what would Gorbachev do with all those troops if he brought them home, where there were neither barracks nor missions for them?

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 247

Others had concerns as well. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, despite soothing public noises, vigorously opposed unification in private, while French President Francois Mitterrand was concerned that it might upset his dreams of a European monetary union. The most strongly felt was Poland’s fear that unification would call into question the Helsinki Accords that guaranteed its post-World War II border. Helmut Kohl was the key. He was ready to give Mitterrand what he wanted regarding the monetary union in return for support of unification, and he more or less ignored Thatcher. But he was not prepared to reassure the Poles until the general election to be held late in 1990. To hold his party and its governing coalition together, Kohl had to make sure he did not alienate his electoral allies, among which were perhaps two million conservative Silesian Germans who had fled their farms and towns in 1945 and whose former lands were now part of Poland. Therefore, whereas Kohl spoke increasingly warmly of the need for unification after the beginning of 1990, he refused to give a categorical guarantee of the Polish border. In the confusing early days of 1990, Hans Modrow attempted to seize the initiative. On February 1, after returning from a visit to Moscow, he proposed creating a neutral, confederal Germany through a complex process leading to eventual joint parliamentary elections and a new constitution. Kohl instantly and resolutely rejected this retread of a plan offered by Stalin in 1952, and within days trumped Modrow by calling for “immediate talks on creating a single German currency.’!3 This unexpected announcement of his intent to extend the deutschmark to the east, which Kohl made against the advice of his advisors and without consulting foreign governments, was probably an economic mistake, since the adoption of the deutschmark by East Germany on July 1 instantaneously bankrupted many East German firms and seriously disrupted the European monetary system. But politically it was a brilliant ploy that clearly demonstrated to the East German public that unification was coming, that Kohl was its bearer, and that East Germans would soon have the almost mythological powers of Europe’s strongest currency bestowed upon them.!4 Less than two weeks later the two Germanies and the four occupying powers from World War II took advantage of a previously scheduled meeting in Ottawa concerning a different subject to announce that they had agreed on a formula

for working out the details of unification, the so-called “two plus four” plan. Proposed and sold to the participants by the United States with the approval of Helmut Kohl and closely connected to other negotiations underway over mutual troop reductions, this plan permitted the two Germanies to work out their unification scheme first, whereupon the four occupying powers would, presumably, approve it. The strategic significance of this agreement was that since the two Germanies would negotiate their own arrangement, heavily influenced by Kohl and his ally Bush, it was essentially assured that the resultant unified state would remain a part of NATO. It also simplified things, since none of the other potential players (other NATO partners, the Conference on Security and Cooperation

in Europe [CSCE], and the European Community) would participate. After

248 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Poland protested, it was invited to those sessions at which border questions were discussed. The conditions under which the East German elections were held on March 18, therefore, were unique. In the few months available to them, the East Germans created more than twenty political parties. By early February the most important of them had coalesced into five main parties, which among them represented two general directions, a left and a right. From the beginning, however, the real contest was not among these groupings but between the two main West German parties, the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats. These West German parties stepped into the East German campaign with ample funds and sophisticated organizations. Willy Brandt, legendary former social democratic chancellor, and Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democrats gave numerous campaign talks in the East, with Kohl in particular drawing hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic listeners. By this time Kohl had moved into high gear toward unification, which he made the center point of his campaign. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, under the leadership of the weaker and less appealing Oskar

Lafontaine, adopted a critical attitude toward unification, arguing that delay would be the best policy.!5 Meanwhile, the New Forum and similar reform elements held out for a renewal of socialism in an independent East Germany. The election in effect became a referendum on unification. When Kohl's coalition, called the Alliance for Germany, won over 48 percent of the vote in comparison with only 22 percent for the Social Democrats, the die for unification was cast. The Communists got a respectable 16 percent, but the great losers were the former oppositionists. Not only were they too late and too unrepresentative, but by holding out for an independent socialist East Germany they found themselves completely outflanked by their powerful capitalist neighbors, who unceremoniously moved in and imposed their West German party organizations. Initially the defeated Social Democrats refused to join in a grand coalition with the victorious Alliance for Germany, but after a month of negotiations they finally consented to enter a five-party coalition put together by their leader Lothar de Maziere. The new government, representing 75 percent of the voters of East Germany, set as its goal “to achieve the unity of Germany swiftly and responsibly for the whole of the German Democratic Republic...on the basis of Article 23 of the basic Law.”'6 This last referred to the device that would permit the unification to proceed quickly without the necessity of writing a peace treaty or resorting to some other cumbersome device, like writing a new constitution. Strictly speaking, West Germany did not operate under a constitution but under the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of 1949. Article 23 of this law permitted new Lander,

or German regional states, to fall under the jurisdiction of the Basic Law if they joined the Federal Republic. The Saarland, which was not included in the original Federal Republic at the end of World War II, used this provision to become part of West Germany as the tenth Land in 1956.17 Uncertainty over the cost of incorporating the German Democratic Republic into West Germany became a potentially serious problem for Helmut Kohl in the

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 249

spring of 1990, especially after the elections in East Germany. The more West German economists looked at the decrepit East European industries, the more pessimistic became their estimates of what would be needed to set things right. Already resenting the large number of what they considered undisciplined and incompetent East Germans who had flooded westward, some West Germans began wondering if unification was such a good idea. The Social Democrats, who now seemed to be picking up strength in by-elections in West Germany, sought to take advantage of the unease by calling for further negotiations rather than simply annexing the East by means of Article 23. These feelings were not assuaged when Hans Modrow complained that the $4.1 billion West Germany had pledged in outright aid in February 1990 was not even half enough. To forestall concerns on both sides of the border, in May Kohl announced the “German Unity Fund,” in what seemed at the time to be the stupendous amount of almost $70 billion. He claimed that this fund would finance the reconstruction of East Germany without any additional income taxes and produce a “blooming landscape” there. Actually, Kohl’s estimate of the cost of unification turned out to be absurdly low, as far off the mark as his prediction of almost immediate prosperity. Over the next twenty years West Germany ended up spending more than $2 trillion in East Germany.!8 A good deal of this money went into infrastructure—building roads, installing communications networks, and rebuilding bridges. In only one of these projects, the West Germans undertook a $30 billion renovation of the East German telephone system that anticipated raising the number of telephones from 1.8 million in 1989 to 7.1 million in 1997, installing one million miles of fiber-optic and copper cables, and building two thousand digital telephone exchanges. Already by July 1991 a long distance network of thirty-four thousand lines replaced the primitive East German equipment that had provided only two hundred international long distance lines. The majority of the United Fund did not go to infrastructure or investment, however, but to maintaining the income of East German workers through a social services safety net and a policy of maintaining wage parity between western and eastern Germany. This kind of expense mounted quickly in part because of the currency unification that officially took place on July 1, 1990.20 Had the exchange rate been consistent with economic relationships, as most of Kohl’s advisors wanted, East Germans probably would have received about one deutschmark for every four eastern marks. But Kohl felt strongly that anything less than a one to one exchange would be humiliating for the East Germans and permanently damage intra-German relations. Thus when the deutschmark became the legal currency of East Germany at the basic rate of one to one many East German enterprises immediately went bankrupt.2! Suddenly competing in a world market rather than in the sheltered East European trade system, and now having to buy inputs at world prices and to pay wages in deutschmarks, the economy of the GDR collapsed. During 1990 and 1991, production in the sector that Communists had most prized, heavy industry, fell approximately 60 percent. The other side of the coin is that currency unification did not only mean an exchange of money,

250 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

it meant that in one fell swoop the entire way of organizing the east German economy—banking law, social security payments, property transfer rules, and so forth—was transformed. This was real unification even before the fact.

On its part, the East German government realized that it would have to reorganize its centrally planned economy. In the spring of 1990, therefore, the Volkskammer created an agency to evaluate what to change and how to do it, the Treuhandanstalt (Treuhand). With unification, Treuhand fell into the hands of West German administrators who turned it into a massive privatizing agency. With 90 percent of the productive capacity of East Germany under its control and 57 percent of the land, Treuhand established supervisory boards for each company, worked out reasonable balance sheets, and began selling or closing firms at the rate of ten to fifteen a day.”2 It received criticism for moving too slowly, but in comparison to the rest of Eastern Europe, as well as in comparison to that great privatizer Margaret Thatcher, who took eleven years to sell off less than 5 percent of the British economy, it moved with lightening speed. Over the next four years it disposed of approximately 12,000 enterprises before going out of existence, although its successors still manage substantial property in the eastern states of

Germany. And where did the money come from to support the newly unemployed, retired, or redundant workers in East Germany? Despite promises to the contrary, in 1991, shortly after his Christian Democratic coalition won the election of December 1990, Kohl introduced a “Solidarity Tax” to help pay for the aid to Eastern Germany. Allegedly temporary, this 5.5 percent surcharge on German income taxes will actually remain in place until at least 2019.23 One of the remarkable features of the diplomatic landscape in 1990 was the ease with which Kohl, Gorbachev, and Bush interacted with each other and with other major leaders. All of them, as well as their major assistants, met dozens of times through 1990, usually acting more or less on their own without lengthy internal negotiations within their bureaucracies. Bush and Kohl worked particularly closely together. Bush’s main strategy was to remain calm and to find ways to reassure Gorbachev that the changes in Germany were not threatening to the USSR. Bush and Kohl especially wanted to avoid anything that might cause a change at the top in the Soviet Union and thereby slow the process of perestroika there. On his part, Gorbachev was less concerned about international relations than about deteriorating domestic affairs. But for a while the future of NATO was a key issue. Initially, Gorbachev hoped that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, one active in West Germany and the other in East Germany, could gradually fade away in the context of a new European security structure. But early in 1990 it was becoming clear that the train had already left the station, as one of Gorbachev's advisors put it. In February U. S. Secretary of State James A. Baker argued to Gorbachev that a united Germany outside of NATO could easily become dangerous. Inside NATO, however, restrained by the American presence, it would become a factor for stability. No one at the time was thinking that countries like Poland might become part of NATO, so Baker mollified Gorbachev by saying that it was not the American intention to expand NATO beyond a unified Germany.”4

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 251

Gorbachev noted Baker’s comment, but by the time NATO expansion became a reality, Baker, he, and Bush were all out of office. Baker soothed Gorbachev with further promises as well. For example, in a May meeting he promised that a united Germany would never possess, store, or use nuclear or chemical weapons. By the time Helmut Kohl visited Moscow and then Gorbachev's home town of Stavropol in July, Gorbachev was mollified and looking for a way out. Assuring him that NATO had no intention of making any threatening moves toward the east, Kohl offered the USSR $7.6 billion to help pay for the withdrawal of its troops stationed in East Germany and to assist it in constructing new bases in which to house the soldiers once they arrived back in the Soviet Union. In addition the West Germans gave the Soviets a $1.9 billion interest free loan to help them defray the costs of maintaining their troops during the interim period. An outmaneuvered Gorbachev accepted and agreed to have the troops out by 1994. Gorbachev's staff was appalled, but unification was a done deal. Several technical issues remained to be resolved. West German electoral

rules were adopted for the national election coming up late in 1990 after the planned unification, with the exception that for that election alone the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Bundestag would apply separately in East and West Germany, thus giving some smaller East German parties a chance. Abortion was another major issue. East Germany allowed abortion on demand, whereas it was severely restricted in West Germany. The compromise was to permit the East Germans to retain their law for two years, during which time the Bundestag would write a new law for the united Germany.25 And then there was the technical problem that East Germany was not organized into the traditional Lander that the Basic Law required but into seventeen Bezirke, or counties. The East German Volkskammer solved this problem in July by abolishing the Bezirke and restoring the five pre-cold-war Lander. Polish fears that a united Germany would start claiming its old territories across the Oder/Neisse line were put to rest when both German parliaments adopted resolutions renouncing any such claims and when the two plus four treaty made the post-World War II borders definitive. With these and many other ducks in line, on September 12, 1990, the six concerned states met in Moscow and signed the two plus four treaty. On October 3 the two Germanies became one. What one year earlier no one had imagined possible had become a reality. On December 2, when Germany held its first allGerman election since 1932, Helmut Kohl and his ruling coalition reaped the reward of his handling of the unification by taking 55 percent of the vote in both east and west. The Social Democrats, who campaigned on a platform stressing the costs of unification and emphasizing social and environmental issues, and who early in 1990 had nurtured realistic hopes of winning this election, took only 33 percent of the vote, their lowest figure since 1957. Because of the special rules for 1990, the East German reform coalition called Alliance 90 took one seat in the Bundestag and the former East German Communist party got two, but neither

252 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

enjoyed any prospect of maintaining even that miniscule position in the future. East Germany passed into history.

COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION During the months that it took to reunite Germany, enhancing its position as the strongest power in Europe, the Soviet Union, until then considered a world superpower, was collapsing. Americans (and a good many Soviets) often thought of the Soviet Union as Russia writ large, sometimes calling it “Soviet Russia,” and using a Russian bear as its symbol in political cartoons. In actuality, of course, the Soviet Union was a federal state in which only approximately half of its almost

three hundred million inhabitants were ethnically Russian. One hundred and twenty-seven officially recognized ethnic groups made up the other half, most of them having been gathered around the edges of Russia over its long history of imperial expansion. Until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, this fact did not seem of central importance. Not until 1988, for example, did Robert Gates, head of the CIA, begin “to realize how small and inadequate were our collection capabilities and expertise on the non-Russian republics.”2° Gates came to this realization in that year because glasnost had opened the door for activists to say things that earlier had been forbidden, so that by 1988 agitation for national self-determination, sovereignty, and independence had bubbled to the surface throughout the Soviet Union. At the moment German unification took effect, nationalism had become one of the most powerful mobilizing forces in the USSR, not just in the peripheral republics, but even in Russia itself. Nationalism was one of the “isms,” such as liberalism, socialism and communism, bequeathed to European politics by the French Revolution. It grew in significant measure out of the notion of popular sovereignty, the revolutionary argument that people should be in charge of their own political development. But who were “the people?” Nineteenth-century liberals said property owners should constitute the political class; socialists said the working class who produced the wealth that created property should have the vote; and Soviet communists said the people, or proletariat, as they put it, would be properly represented by the “vanguard of the working class,” or the party. But nationalists had a different answer. They simply said “we” are sovereign, we who recognize each other because we speak the same language, have a common history or religion, and follow similar customs. This set of ideas emerged in the nineteenth century in the context of an already existing European state system. Therefore, when some intellectuals and politicians began identifying and then mobilizing their nations, they eventually came to the conclusion that the only way their people would be recognized as fully authentic would be for them to have “their own’ state. Already in 1987 glimmerings of this kind of national sentiment appeared in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.?” All three had been inde-

pendent in the interwar period, but in 1940 Stalin had forcibly brought them under Moscow's control. Fifty years later, the memory of independence lingered.

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 253

In November 1987 Lithuanians held public demonstrations in honor of the formation of the first independent Lithuanian government in 1918, and in the first months of 1988 various proposals for an increased level of autonomy surfaced in all three Baltic republics. In June 1988, a group of Lithuanian artists and intellectuals met to form The Lithuanian Reform Movement (Lietuvos Persitvarkymo Sajiidis), a nationalist organization that came to be known simply as Sajtdis. Originally supportive of perestroika, by early 1989 it had set as its goal full independence for Lithuania. Sajidis and similar movements elsewhere in the Baltics began to attract the enthusiastic support of ordinary citizens, at least the nonRussian ones. The most dramatic evidence of this upwelling was the creation on August 23, 1989, of a six hundred mile long human chain stretching across the Baltic region to protest the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 that had led to annexation by the Soviet Union. The most worrisome warning sign of what a nationalist future might hold came in the Caucasus region, which included the soviet republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. After months of agitation, in February 1988 a devastating eruption of ethnic violence broke out between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh, which was an ethnically Armenian enclave entirely within the republic of Azerbaijan. This marked the beginning of years of demonstrations, riots, and even full scale warfare that resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of refugees. To this day Nagorno Karabakh, while no longer engulfed in violence, is still the subject of passionate feelings and its formal status remains unsettled, the subject of seemingly endless negotiations. It represents a worstcase scenario of what virulent nationalism might have brought to the rest of the Soviet Union. Events in the republic of Georgia in April 1989 suggest why such a sustained sequence of violence did not sweep through all the Soviet republics. On April 9 of that year demonstrations in Tblisi on behalf of greater Georgian autonomy led to the brutal intervention of Soviet troops and the death of sixteen demonstrators. Authorized by local authorities and confirmed by military leaders in Moscow without Gorbachev's approval, the shock of this intervention had two important effects.28 First, it convinced many Georgians that what they really wanted was independence, not autonomy. And second, when Gorbachev sympathized with the demonstrators rather than justifying the attack on the basis of maintaining public order, he sent a message both to future demonstrators and to his own staff that public protests would not be put down by force. Although this rule was broken occasionally in the next two years, notably in Baku and the Baltic republics, violent suppression was usually instigated by Gorbachev's conservative rivals and never became routine. Still, Gorbachev did not want the Soviet Union to break up. He was willing to let the East European countries go their own way. At a party conference in June, 1988, for example, he said that “a key place in the new thinking is occupied by the concept of freedom of choice,” and at the United Nations in December of that year he said “For us the necessity of the principle of freedom of choice

254 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

is clear.... Freedom of choice is a universal principle and there should be no exceptions.” But the possibility that non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union might seek the same sort of choice as, say, Hungarians was foreign to him. “Is it really true that the Baltic people want to secede?” he asked close advisors only

three days after his UN speech. When his staff affirmed that it was probably true, he said “They will perish when they cut themselves off from the rest of the Union. What self-delusion and naiveté!”30 Why then, understanding the dangers if not the motivations of the separatists, was he not willing to pursue a more forceful defense of Soviet unity such as his conservative opponents sought? One reason was that even though Gorbachev could be tough, even arbitrary, he was personally averse to violence. He was supremely confident that he could work things out, that solutions would present themselves, that the circle could be squared. More basic perhaps was his idealism, his belief in the vision of a new Europe in which all political systems, the socialism he was saving and

the capitalist system too, could live in harmonious peace. The severely critical reactions of Western government to the few outbursts of internal violence indicated how damaging it was to this vision. Would a more forceful policy have saved the Soviet Union? Probably not, or at least not without a horrible cost. Once the nationalist genie got out of the bottle it was hard to put back in. If the experiences of the former Yugoslavia or Chechnya in the 1990s provide an example, the most likely outcome would have been a substantial increase in terrorism, military intervention, bloodshed, and economic disaster. Instead, the Soviet Union disintegrated peacefully. Gorbachev's critics chastise him for being an idealist, for being too self-confident, for putting off decisions and for many other failings, but when he did leave the scene, he did so without blood on his hands. It is often said that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the failure of its centrally planned economy. Soviet style economies did not work as well as the mixed economies of the West and in classical economic terms they were inefficient. But this does not mean they did not work. Even though observers on both sides of the iron curtain in 1980 knew the Soviet economy was having difficulties, as of 1985 no one believed it was close to collapse. A survey of sev-

eral hundred Soviet economists conducted by Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich showed that essentially all Soviet economists in the mid to late 1980s understood that changes in the economy were needed, but nevertheless considered the system stable.3! Most Soviet citizens were poor, but they lived normal lives, going to work, drinking tea, joking, resigned to their jobs perhaps,

but appreciating the social safety net and what products the creaky economy provided them.:?

But two unexpected events intervened to wreak havoc with this stability. When Gorbachev's policies began to undermine and then destroy the authority of the party and its apparatchiks, the economy lost its leaders. Less and less able to count on their own authority and the comfortable if irregular

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 255

relationships that permitted the system to work, the party regulars who ran the old economy lost their way and it began to fall apart. A few quick witted wheelers and dealers grasped that if a new day was dawning, they should find ways to turn social property into their own private property, and many former apparatchiks began stripping the assets of state enterprises into their own pockets. The second unanticipated economic problem was a decline in the international price of oil that cut the receipts from the Soviet Union’s most important export more or less in half during the second half of the 1980s. At first the authorities thought they could muddle through by borrowing abroad or simply increasing the money supply, that is, by printing money. But by 1989 and 1990 that had led to significant inflation without increasing the supply of consumer goods. State money managers tried several expedients, such as invalidating all 50 and 100 ruble notes overnight allegedly to check speculators, or ordering all enterprises to turn over a high proportion of their foreign currency reserves.

But these band aids did not stop the bleeding. Adding to the stress ordinary Russians were feeling in 1989 and 1990 were a series of massive miners’ strikes in the Kuznets and Donets basins in the middle of 1990. The Soviet economy was indeed failing, but it was primarily a matter of the removal of the party from the center of soviet life, along with the lowered price of oil, that provided the push to insolvency, not the undoubted inefficiencies of the highly centralized economy. The increasing nationalist fervor in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and in Ukraine definitely threatened the existence of the Soviet Union, but in a sense none of them were central, that is, none of them were Russian. But as the economy worsened, the nationalist agitations intensified and the international situation eroded, a Russian national leader did emerge: Boris Yeltsin. From a poorer

background that Gorbachev, Yeltsin rose in the Soviet hierarchy through his hard work and success as an engineer. As the vigorous party boss in the industrial region of Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin made his reputation as a no nonsense practical reformer. When Gorbachev and his allies raised Yeltsin to the politburo in 1985, he became the party boss in Moscow. Already someone who preferred practical results over ideology, he declared that Moscow's supposedly rosy economy situation was exaggerated by “window dressing,’ and set about getting rid of those who “have been playing make-believe.”33 At first Gorbachev applauded, but in January 1987, when Yeltsin offered critical comments on a program drafted by Gorbachev, their ways began to part. By October Yeltsin was so fed up that he shocked his colleagues by an impromptu speech to the Politburo in which he attempted to resign. Eventually he was permitted to do so, but only after being humiliated by overwhelming criticism from all sides. But he was not sent to the gulag, as would have happened in the past.34 Instead he recovered his balance in a government sanatorium and by mid-1988 was able to defend himself again at a central committee meeting. A reformer at heart, and starting to realize the

256 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

political possibilities offered by the new more open atmosphere, he decided in 1989 to run for the Congress of People’s Deputies. The more the authorities attacked him, the more popular he became, and he swept home with 89 percent of the votes in his Moscow district. Suddenly Yeltsin had a new kind of authority that Gorbachev never achieved—legitimation by popular vote. Over the next year, while Eastern Europe was detaching itself from the USSR and German unification was proceeding apace, Yeltsin continued his criticisms of Gorbachev, outbidding him with the public by supporting sovereignty in the republics (including Russia itself), questioning the role of the Communist party and the KGB, and criticizing the pace of reform.35 On a trip to the United States, where he was privately ridiculed by American leaders for his gauche behavior, he suddenly realized how far his own country had to go. Early in 1990, he made a fateful decision. Rather than focus his energies on combating his enemy Gorbachev at the Union level, he resigned from the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies to run for a seat in the Russian legislature.26 On March 4, 1990, he once again won a landslide victory with 84 percent of the vote in his district. On May 29, despite

serious opposition from conservative opponents, he became the Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, that is, the democratically sanctioned leader of the largest (three-quarters of the land mass and more than half of the population), richest (massive oil and natural gas deposits), and most powerful (site of thousands of nuclear weapons) part of the Soviet Union. This was the tipping point for Gorbachev. As Yeltsin put it at the time, without the support of Russia (that is without the support of Yeltsin) Gorbachev was powerless.?” To drive this point home, in June 1990 the Russian Supreme Soviet declared that henceforth Russia would be a sovereign state, its laws taking precedence over those of the union. For the next year the so-called “war of laws” became ever more heated, as other republics also declared their sovereignty and began to dispute just what Soviet laws they would and would not follow. Keep in mind that these events on the home front were occurring just as Gorbachev had to respond to the events surrounding the unification of Germany. So far, only Lithuania out of the fifteen Soviet republics had declared actual independence, although two enclaves in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, had rashly taken the step as well. The central government declared Lithuania's declaration invalid and wrote a new law to regularize possible secession from the union (which was allegedly guaranteed by the Soviet constitution). But the law was so restrictive—it required a two-thirds vote of the citizens of the seceding country and a five-year waiting period—that Lithuania simply laughed it off. Gorbachev threatened and cajoled, but to no avail. Suddenly on the night of January 12-13, 1991, while Gorbachev was in London, Soviet troops, mobilized by Gorbachev's conservative opponents, seized the main television station in Vilnius, in the process killing fourteen people and wounding many more. A week later a similar attack in Riga killed four people. These attacks not only outraged the Baltics, but heightened the sense among reform advocates that Gorbachev was no longer really in control. He apologized, but slowly, and stopped the use

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 257

of force, but his reputation, which had declined precipitously during 1990, took another serious hit.3° Gorbachev's moves in 1991 smack of desperation. Aware that the Soviet Union was in serious danger, he now called for a union-wide referendum on whether the USSR should be reworked into a federation of “equal sovereign republics.” In March three-quarters of the electorate voted yes. Ominously, in the very same referendum, voters in the Russian republic approved the direct election of a president for their republic, and on June 12 Boris Yeltsin won that election on the first ballot. Gorbachev forged ahead by inviting the leaders of all the republics, including Yeltsin, to see if they could work out a new union treaty. Only nine showed up, but by July an even more truncated group had worked out a deal and set August 20, 1991, as the date for formal signing of a new union agreement. Gorbachev had always been popular in the West, so much so that in 1990 he won the Nobel Prize for Peace. But by that year he was already distinctly unpopular in his own country. For ordinary people, economic chaos and increasing hardship precipitated the dissatisfaction. But for many in public life, especially those concerned with security issues, the loss of East Germany, the unilateral withdrawal of troops from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the total collapse of the Warsaw Pact, which officially went out of existence on July 1, 1991, were a disaster. As Dimitrii Yazov, Soviet Defense Minister, put it, his “whole life was being betrayed.”39 While Gorbachev struggled to maintain some semblance of a union, many of those surrounding him shifted from merely verbal complaints to actual conspiracy, hoping to bring back what they considered the good old authoritarian days. These hard liners did not hide their contempt for Gorbachev, nor even their intentions. In June, James A. Baker warned his Soviet counterpart that the military and the KGB were planning a coup. In the same month the USSR prime minister, supported by prominent conservatives, proposed that the Soviet cabinet be given the power to operate without Gorbachev's approval. Some called this an effort at a “constitutional coup d'état,” but Gorbachev easily squashed it, remarking afterward in the presence of those who made the proposal, “The coup is over.*0 When Yegor Yakovlev resigned from Gorbachev's staff in July, he warned the president,” The people around you are rotten.” “You exaggerate, Gorbachev replied.4! But Yakovlev did not exaggerate. On the afternoon of August 18, while on vacation in the south, Gorbachev found himself under house arrest, and at 6:00 a.m. the next morning a cabal of officers and conservative officials announced that due to the mortal danger hanging over the country as a result of Gorbachev's reforms they had created a Public Committee for the State of Emergency and seized power.

The coup of August 19 was perhaps not the most inept coup attempt in Russian history. That dubious honor probably goes to the Decembrist Revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. But it was close. Despite the fact that its leaders included the prime minister, the head of the KGB, the Minister of the Interior (i.e., head of the police), and the Minister of Defense, the conspirators did not

258 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

have a coherent plan. The did not close down or occupy Moscow TV stations, for example, or even cut the telephones to the building of the Russian parliament, known as the White House, eventually permitting Western correspondents more or less free access to the world press. Nor did they arrest anyone of importance, including Boris Yeltsin. The elite KGB force ominously known as Alpha Group surrounded Yeltsin’s dacha outside of Moscow, but when he was awoken by his aides and driven into Moscow they did nothing to stop him. Tanks were mobilized in support of the coup, and they took up strategic positions in the city, but the troops were uneasy, uncertain of what they were supposed to do. About 12:30 on the day of the coup Yeltsin calmly walked out of the White House, jumped up on a tank that was facing him, shook hands with the driver, pumped his fist, and read a brief statement. Captured on film by CNN and immediately broadcast to the world, this heroic image instantly made Yeltsin’s reputation as the leader and galvanizer of reform in Russia. By evening tens of thousands of people surrounded the White House. The news conference that the coup leaders held that evening could not have presented a greater contrast. With the nominal leader apparently drunk, his hands shaking uncontrollably, and with the others looking like the gray incompetents they were, the coup had no chance. On August 21 the troops and their tanks returned to their quarters, Gorbachev returned to Moscow, and the leaders of the coup were arrested. But this did not end the disastrous effect of this climactic moment. Prior to the coup attempt, two republics, Lithuania and Georgia, had declared their independence. In the ten days after the attempt nine others followed suit.12 Within days Yeltsin suspended the Communist party in Russia and seized all of its property, along with the property of the Soviet government itself. By early September virtually all power was in the hands of the republics and Gorbachev was left with a hollow shell. The final scene of the final act began on December 1 when Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence. A few days later Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus created a new entity, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), with the proviso that Russia, not the CIS, was to be the legal successor to the Soviet Union. When most of the other republics quickly signed on Gorbachev gave up. On December 25, 1991, he resigned as president and the Soviet Union came to an end. Mikhail Gorbachev had his limitations. His critics pointed out that he was

too idealistic to be a national leader, dreaming of a common European home instead of defending Russia’s geopolitical interests; his co-workers despaired of his willingness to see how things would work out rather than to make clear-cut decisions; most Russians thought he catered too much to the West; and foreigners, despite their admiration for him, noted that he underestimated the power of nationalism and brought little or no understanding of economics to his job. But these and other criticisms do not dim his accomplishment. It is not difficult to agree with Gorbachev's own assessment, given in his farewell speech on that Christmas Day:43

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 259 Fate had it that when I found myself at the head of the state it was already clear that all was not well in the country.... The society was suffocating in the vise of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race. It had reached the limit of its possibility... We could not go on living like that....[R]enovating the country turned out to be far more complicated than could be expected. However, what has been done ought to be given its due. This society acquired freedom, [and] liberated itself political and spiritually.... The totalitarian system has been eliminated.... The movement to a diverse economy has started.... We opened ourselves to the world.

THE EUROPEAN UNION The third new element of the new European order was the most important: the European Union.‘* The roots of this remarkable institution lay in the great European civil war of 1914 to 1945. The devastation left by the colossal futility of this brutal thirty-year episode was not only physical—Europe lay in ruins in 1945—but also psychological. Nazism and fascism had been shown to be worse than dead ends, but the confidence that had characterized Europe at the turn of the twentieth century was gone. Could capitalism survive? Did the atomic bomb mean that humans would completely destroy themselves? Did devastation and poverty lie ahead? The meeting of the Soviet Union and the United States over the body of a prostrate Europe left the continent divided into two halves, the Communist half dominated by Stalinist regimes, and the Western half supported in many ways by the United States. The creation of NATO in 1949 committed the United States to provide a security umbrella for Western Europe, which it did right up to 1989 and beyond. Freed from the necessity to confront the Soviet Union and its East European satellites alone, European leaders focused on rebuilding and then growing their economies. In an era when the most important economic asset was heavy industry this meant insuring the stability of the iron and steel industries. In the east, each country or region insisted on having its own steel mill, regardless of its economic rationality, because this would make them “modern.” In the west, France, using a similar way of thinking, at first tried to prevent, or at least hinder, defeated Germany from rebuilding its heavy industry. But in 1950, under pressure from the United States to come up with a more constructive idea, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman surprised the Americans, and even some of his own countrymen, by proposing that Germany and France, along with the Benelux countries and Italy, create a tariff free zone for the coal and steel sectors of their economies. This plan was the idea of Jean Monnet, who was in charge of French economic planning.45 Monnet had excellent connections, especially in the United States, which applauded the idea. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed too, in part because he believed that a rapprochement between Germany and France, bitter enemies for many generations, was vital to the future peace of Europe and in part because he believed that it was the only way to help defeated Germany return to full strength. By 1951 six countries (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) joined together

260 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

to establish the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the stem cell, so to speak, of the future European Union. NATO and the Coal and Steel Community were not the only transnational organizations that transformed the way postwar European nation states interacted. The United Nations was of course a significant new intergovernmental entity, but several important economic organizations emerged from the war as well. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), founded in 1947,

provided a venue for negotiating the reduction of trade barriers. Today it has evolved into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Two other significant new financial organizations were the World Bank, designed to assist developing countries, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), devoted to the stabilization of currency. Inside Europe itself there was the Organization for European Economic Development (OEED; after 1967 called the Organization for European

Cooperation and Development—OECD), established when the Marshall Plan insisted that those receiving American aid come up with a joint effort, not simply bilateral appeals for help; the Council of Europe, founded in 1949 to promote human rights; and the similarly tasked European Court of Human Rights (1950). Over the forty years that followed, others would emerge as well, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In other words, the venues for facilitating peaceful governmental interactions increased enormously in the wake of World War II. The experience of constantly discussing and even sometimes resolving thousands of issues in these new negotiating nodes greatly added to the sense of shared sovereignty that came to characterize the postwar style of international politics in Western Europe. In the 1950s European economies began a sustained boom led by West

Germany, although probably not as a direct result of the Coal and Steel Community. This new cooperative arrangement did remove tariffs in its area of competence; but tariffs on coal and steel had not been substantial in the first place, and many of non-tariff barriers to trade remained. The Community's main

impacts were ameliorating formerly suspicious and hostile relations between France and Germany and putting in place a set of supranational organizations, such as a court, an advisory parliament, and a high authority, which served as templates for future interactions. Despite some serious controversies, particularly involving the rearmament of Germany, by 1957 the six community members were sufficiently pleased with how things were going to create two further entities, Euratom to deal with atomic energy, and the European Economic Community, the purpose of which was to create a customs-free trade area among the six. Ten years later, by which time the six had in fact removed internal customs barriers, the three entities combined into one, the European Community (EC), which still existed at the moment the Berlin Wall collapsed (and in fact still exists). The basic governing units of the community were the Council of Ministers (now called the Council of the European Union), which adopted the community's laws; the Commission, which administered them; a court, which interpreted them; and the parliament, which, although powerless at first, eventually grew into a partner

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 261

in the law-making process. When it became clear that political commitment for major initiatives had to come from the governments of member states, the members created the European Council, which consisted of the heads of state of all member countries. The European Council meets regularly to give the community its basic direction. From a distance and in retrospect, the pathway to the integration of Europe appears smooth, almost inevitable. A bare bones timeline shows milestone after milestone being achieved right up to the Lisbon Treaty of 2009. Every current member joined the community voluntarily though a democratic process, and all members practice a form of “social economy” in which industry, labor, and government find cooperative ways to provide economic and social stability. In fact, of course, the road was rough in the extreme, with the very existence of the community more than once in question. Because every nation entered the EC as a sovereign state with its own practices, laws, finances, customs, prejudices, and goals, every issue impinged on at least one country, and usually on many. France, under the assertive leadership of Charles de Gaulle, the president of that country from 1958 to 1969, was the most vigorous in pursuing its interests among the early members. De Gaulle despised the idea of supranational institutions in which France would lose some of its sovereignty, but when he believed that the EC might benefit France, especially in agriculture, he was willing to work with it. By the time he left office the Community had achieved its early goal of completing a customs union while at the same time fashioning a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that became a boon to inefficient French farmers. On the other hand, de Gaulle insisted that all decisions in the Council of Ministers be made by consensus, that is, unanimously, not by any system of weighted voting. When a proposal for weighted voting came up he withdrew the French representative from the Council, creating the “empty chair” crisis that was resolved only when the other countries agreed that policy would continue to be made by consensus, thus effectively giving France (or any other member country) a veto. De Gaulle also vetoed Great Britain’s application for admission to the Community not once but twice in the 1960s, fearing that the admission of such a powerful country with different goals might threaten France's dominance over the CAP. But, and it is a big but, in 1963 he did sign a treaty of friendship with Konrad Adenauer that wrote finish to the ancient Franco-German hostility, something that the relatively smooth operation of the Coal and Steel Community had helped make possible.

While eyes of Europe and the United States were on de Gaulle and his machinations on behalf of French grandeur, the mechanisms of the EC began to develop out of sight in Brussels. Each country established diplomatic offices there, and as the community's work became increasingly technical its professional staff, otherwise known as its bureaucracy, expanded accordingly.47 Not least important among the Community institutions was the European Court of Justice, which began producing decisions of lasting import. In 1963 a Dutch firm argued that it was being taxed by Dutch authorities in ways not consistent with

262 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

EC agreements. The court agreed, stating that the community “constitutes a new legal order of international law for the benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights.”48 In the following year it ruled that EC law had supremacy over national law because otherwise the entire project of the community would be called into question. To the surprise of some, national courts accepted these rulings, and it became established that when agreements had been reached at the Community level, they were binding on all members. By 1970 the EC was up and running, its finances on a relatively firm footing and its administration in competent hands. It even began negotiations with four potential new members, leading in 1973 to the admission of Great Britain (finally), Denmark, and Ireland (voters in Norway rejected membership, and that country has never joined). The EC was bound by the treaty of Rome to seek “harmonization’ of the members’ economies, which it attempted to do by negotiating the bewildering variety of non-tariff barriers that continued to constrain truly free trade. It was laborious, time-consuming, and contentious work. But even when agreement could not be reached, the process itself had the effect of binding the members ever closer with thousands of tiny threads. By simply working on problems, the members created negotiating norms and became accustomed to working together peacefully (i.e., without actual war), and the process ground on. In the 1970s, after some major horse-trading, the EC established a regional fund to help poor areas, signed an association agreement with 46 developing countries, and created the European Investment Bank. Despite these and other significant accomplishments, as the 1970s wore on a sense developed that the Community was faltering. The main controversy that developed after de Gaulle’s departure revolved around Great Britain’s complaints that the financial provisions under which it had joined were unfair. In fact, the only two members who paid into the EC more than it took out were Germany and Britain. Germany more or less kept its counsel, in part to establish and maintain its reputation as a good and peaceful neighbor after the disasters of the first half of the century, but Britain did not. In one form or another, contentious negotiations over Britain's contributions went on with only occasional breaks almost up to the moment the Berlin Wall fell. Worse, as far as the public was concerned, the EC found itself unable to deal with the recession and malaise brought on by the huge spike in oil prices occasioned by the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the almost simultaneous collapse of the postwar financial agreements that had kept currencies stable. Neither had the Community found a way to coordinate its defense and foreign policies in ways that the supranationalists had always hoped. For these reasons and more, as the 1980s began eurosceptics were using words like “stagnation’ and “sclerotic” to describe the EC, words that seemed to characterize the public view of the Community as well. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s the atmosphere began to change. A European Monetary System (EMS), adopted in 1979, went a long way toward solving the difficult issues of international finance. The European Court of Justice ruled in 1979 that products lawfully produced in one country could legally be sold in all

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 263

other Community countries, greatly limiting the effect of non-tariff barriers. In 1981 Greece entered the Community, confirming that whatever the eurosceptics might think, the EC remained attractive to outsiders. Meanwhile, the election first of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and then of Ronald Reagan in the United States increased the commitment to free markets throughout the Western world. In 1983, seventeen CEOs of some of Europe's largest enterprises, including Volvo, Renault, Fiat, Phillips, and others, founded the European Round Table of Industrialists and began to lobby national governments to take measures to increase European competitiveness. Shortly thereafter the European parliament, which since 1979 had been popularly elected but still enjoyed only an advisory role, passed a draft Treaty of European Union, and Jacques Delors, a French advocate of increased European integration, became President of the European Commission, that is, the leader of the European Community. By the mid-1980s, therefore, a groundswell had developed that led in 1987 to the adoption of the Single Europe Act, the most important European agreement since the founding of the Community thirty years earlier. The originality of the single Europe Act was that it specifically stated just what measures each country needed to adopt to create a truly open market and imposed a deadline for doing so. The preliminary White Paper adopted in the lead up to the actual Act called on every member state to make almost 300 specific changes to its national laws and to do it by December 31, 1992. As this process got under way the slogan “1992” began to have real resonance among Europeans. Something important is happening, it seemed to say. The Act also expanded the role of qualified voting on most issues, thus chipping away at de Gaulle’s success in imposing unanimity on all issues. Each country received a number of votes in the Council of Ministers (where proposals were put in their final form) roughly related to its size. Germany, France, Britain, and Italy got ten votes, for example, whereas Luxembourg got only two. For a resolution to be adopted it had to have fifty-four votes of the seventy-six votes available. In other words, the votes of two large countries and one smaller one, or a number of small ones, would be enough to defeat a measure.*? Particularly sensitive issues, like tax policies, still would require consensus. The Act also called for the removal of most of the regulations surrounding border controls, such as checking car registrations, or taxing the amount of fuel in the tanks of entering long-haul trucks. It did not, however, deal with the free travel of persons across borders. Another significant agreement of the 1980s attacked that issue. In 1985, unwilling to wait for consensus among its EC partners, France, Germany, and the Benelux countries agreed near Schengen in Luxembourg to greatly lessen and then eliminate border controls among their countries. Since then this agreement has expanded to become part of the EU laws, with certain exceptions, and to include even countries such as Norway and Switzerland, which are not EU members. Today the ability to drive a car or truck across Europe without stopping or being checked at national borders is one of the most obvious and easily felt reminders of European integration. Among

264 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the ordinary citizens of countries not yet part of the system, entrance into the “Schengen area, which removes the sometimes onerous task of getting visas for every visit, is prized almost as much as actual membership in the European Union itself. Despite grave doubts and numerous problems, when the deadline for implementing the specific changes imposed by the Single Europe Act arrived, a remark-

able 95 percent of them had been adopted. One area in which this was not the case was in monetary union. In adopting the Single Europe Act the heads of state implicitly agreed that monetary union should be part of the overall creation of a single European economic entity, but they did not include any details. Jacques Delors was assigned the highly technical task of figuring out how to establish a common European monetary system. The Delors committee proposed a threestage process, the first phase of which duly began on January 1, 1990. But discus-

sions about how to proceed from there bogged down. One of the reasons that many members, especially France, were in favor of creating a single European

currency (along with all the other technical changes that monetary union implied) was to counter the growing strength of the deutschmark as well as the world wide influence of the American dollar. Once the question of German unification came onto the agenda late in 1989, French President Fran¢ois Mitterrand

was able to work out an unspoken agreement with Helmut Kohl. Mitterrand would support unification if Kohl would agree to monetary union. This did not end the discussion, of course, and the road was rocky until agreement finally was reached at Maastricht only a few days before Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from his presidency in the Soviet Union. The Treaty on European Union was signed on February 9, 1992, and eventually went into effect in November 1993. It not only set the timetable for creating the Euro, which replaced many European currencies in 2002, but established a new entity called the European Union, of which the highly developed and well functioning European Community became the most important constituent part.>° To sum up what can seem like an interminable logjam of negotiations, agreements, and treaties, while Communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the Western European countries were reforming their economic relations, strengthening their mutual interconnections, and preparing for future growth. Not least, they were doing it without resorting to the kind of warfare that had marked the previous century. When East Europeans spoke of “returning to Europe,” they did not refer to a vague geographical notion or to an idealized mélange of disparate cultures and interests, but to a specific organization with a headquarters, rules, expectations, and power—the European Union. Instead of facing two giant aggressors, as in the 1930s, or collapsing empires, as was the case in 1914, Eastern Europe now found itself confronting a peaceful Germany, a collapsed Russia, and a prosperous and united Europe that emphasized human rights, practiced democracy, and operated a functioning social economy. Now the problem was how to take advantage of the opportunity this new European order offered.

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 265

NOTES 1. Mark Kramer, “Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine: A New Era in Soviet-East European Relations?” International Security 14, no. 3 (Winter 1989/90): 63. “Finlandization” refers to the subservient (to the USSR) but free condition of Finland in the first twenty or so years that followed World War II. 2. Keesing’s, 37,024.

3. Due to poor health, Honecker was never brought to trial. He died of liver cancer in Chile in 1994.

4. Edward N. Peterson, The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002). See also the Academy Award winning film, The Lives of Others, for a fascinating insight into the Stasi’s efforts to monitor cultural activities. 5. Stephen Kinzer, “East Germans Face their Accusers,’ New York Times Magazine, April 12, 1992, 27.

6. Gareth Dale, The East German Revolution of 1989 (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2006), 152. 7. December 4, 1989, quotation at the end of his article beginning on p. 1. 8. For a good discussion of the complex diplomatic maneuverings of the year that followed, see Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also my review of Sarotte’s book in Slavic Review 70, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 174-175. From an enormous literature, see also Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); James Addison

Baker, III, and Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989-1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995); Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore: The Woodrow Wilson Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1993); Konrad H. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993); and Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 9. Masterpieces of History :The Peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe, 1989, ed. Svetlana

Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2010), Doc. 101, 586 10. When he assumed office in January, 1989, Bush decided to conduct an assessment of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union and did not engage the Russians for some months. This “pause” frustrated Gorbachev and his advisors, because it left their campaign for acommon European home in limbo. They wondered why such a reevaluation was needed when Bush has been vice president for eight years. 11. New York Times, November 29, 1989, p. 11.

12. These figures from “Zum Vertrag zwischen der Bundesrepublik deutschland und der UdSSR iiber die Bedingungen des befristeten Aufenthalts und die Modalitaten des planmafsigen Abzug der sowjetischen Truppen aus dem Gebiet der Bundesrepublik deutschland, Informationserlaf§ des Auswartigen Amts vom 18.10.1990,” Deutsche Aussen Politik 1990/91 (Bonn: Auswartigen Amt, 1991), 231.

266 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 13. New York Times, February 7, 1990, p. 1.

14. Jonathan R. Zatlin, “Rethinking Reunification: German Monetary Union and European Integration” (paper given at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy, October 30, 1989, available on the Institute’s Web site). 15. Early in February 1990 a poll purported to show that if an election were held in West Germany at that time, the Social Democrats would receive 54 percent of the vote and the Christian Democrats only 11 percent (New York Times, February 9, 1990, article beginning on p. 1). 16. Keesing’s, 37,379 17. The Saarland joined West Germany in 1956 but did not get full rights as a Land until 1959.

18. The Federal Republic had always supported the GDR financially, but the sums were much smaller, averaging just over $1 billion per year for the decade of the 1980s (Fifty Years of the Deutschmark: Central Bank and the Currency in Germany Since 1948, ed. Deutsches Bundesbank [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 637). 19. International Herald Tribune, March 12, 1992, p. 13. 20. Manfred E. Streit, “German Monetary Union,” in Fifty Years of the Deutschmark, ed. Bundesbank, 639-681. 21. The rate of exchange was 1 to 1 for wages and similar items and for savings up to 2,000 east marks, with concessions for older persons, who received a 1 to 1 rate for savings up to 6,000 east marks. Inherited debt and other forms of liability used a rate of 2:1, so that on balance, the overall rate of exchange equaled about 1.5 to 1. 22. Thomas Lange and Geoff Puch, “The Treuhand: A Positive Account,” in Thomas Langeand J. R. Shackleton, The Political Economy of German Unification (Providence, R.I.: Bergahn Books, 1998), 56-71. 23. Note that the surcharge was on the tax rate, not a direct surcharge. So, for example, if your income tax rate was 25 percent, with the surcharge it became 26.375 percent.

24. Baker’s wording (“not an inch”) became controversial. See Thomas Blanton, “U.S. Policy and the Revolutions of 1989,” in Masterpieces of History, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya et al., 91-96. A transcript of the Baker-Gorbachev discussion appears in the same volume, Doc. 119, 675-684. 25. On June 26, 1992, the Bundestag adopted a new law permitting abortion in the first trimester if the pregnant woman declares she is in a state of distress and undergoes official counseling (New York Times, June 27, 1992, p. 3). The basics of this law were confirmed in 2009. 26. Robert Michael Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 510. Gates goes on, however, to praise the agency’s analysts of the Caucasus region. 27. Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). 28. On the decision to use force see Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union, Part 2,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 30, fn. 77. 29. Quoted in Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 225.

CHAPTER 7 « The New European Order 267 30. William Taubman and Svetlana Savranskaya, “If a Wall Fell in Berlin and Moscow Hardly Noticed, Would it Still Make a Noise?” in The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, ed., Jeffrey A. Engel (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2009), 75. “Self-delusion and naiveté,” remarked Chernyaev in his diary (Masterpieces of History, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, et al., Doc. 34, 331). 31. Michael Elman and Vladimir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). 32. The party’s youth newspaper reported in 1989 that “the overwhelming majority of the population of our country lives below the poverty line” (David Remnik, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire [New York: Vintage Books, 1994], 198-215). For a fascinating discussion of the ambiguities and subtleties of Soviet life, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 33. Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 118-119.

34. “Gulag” stands for Glavnoie Upravlienie Ispravitiel’no-Trudovih Lagieriei i kolonii (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies), an arm of the NKVD. The term generally refers to the entire Soviet forced labor system. 35. “Outbidding” is George W. Breslauer’s term, in his Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 136. 36. To avoid confusion here, I simply use the term “legislature.” Yeltsin was elected to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, whose 1,068 delegates elected the 152 members of the Russian Supreme Soviet, which was the actual legislature. The Congress of People’s Deputies elected Yeltsin to the Supreme Soviet, where he became its chairman. 37. Radio Liberty Report on the USSR 2, no. 23 (June 8, 1990): 32.

38. In 1989 Gorbachev's approval rating was in the 55 to 60 percent range. By spring 1990 it had dropped to 20 percent, and it went down from there (Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 [Fall 2004]: 16). 39. Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions

within the Soviet Union (Part 3),” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 8.

40. Dawn Mann, “An Abortive Constitutional Coup d’Etat,” Radio Liberty Report on the USSR 3, no. 27 (July 5, 1991): 6. 41. Remnik, Lenin's Tomb, 436, 447. 42. Colton, Yeltsin, 203. 43. Washington Post, December 26, 1991. 44. Four fundamental books on the creation and functioning of the European Union are Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951 (London: Methuen,

1984); Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002); Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);

and John Gillingham, European Integration 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Desmond Dinan, “The Historiography of the European Union,” in Origins and Evolution of the European Union, ed. Desmond Dinan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 297-324. A good book for classroom use is Duncan Watts, The European Union (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

268 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 45. Fora description of how Monnet and his circle of friends came up with the idea of the Coal and Steel Community in the space of a couple of weeks, and how the French and German governments accepted it within a few days, see Michael Sutton, France and the Construction of Europe, 1944-2007 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 43-51. 46. For a lucid description of how the European Union and its component parts operate see Neill Nugent, The Governance of the European Union, 6th ed. (Durham, N.C-.: Duke University Press, 2006). 47. Note, however, that the EU bureaucracy is quite small in comparison to its responsibilities. In 2004 it consisted of 23,320 employees, which was 0.8 employees per 10,000 citizens of the EU. By comparison, member states averaged about 300 state employees per 10,000 citizens (Nugent, Governance of the European Union, 159). Of course, many EU rules and regulations are enforced by local state officials, who have many non-EU duties as well. 48. Desmond Dinan, Europe Recast: A History of the European Union (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009), 118. 49. As of 2010, the number of votes allotted to the twenty-seven members was 345, with 255 votes needed for a measure to pass. The country votes range from a high of 29 for the largest countries to 3 for Malta. Certain important measures, like the acceptance of a new member, for example, still require unanimity. 50. The European Union created by the Maastricht Treaty had three pillars. The other two, besides the Economic Communities, were the Common Foreign and Security Policy pillar and the Justice and Home Affairs pillar. These latter two pillars have never been particularly effective. The treaty was amended several times until it was replaced by the Treaty of Lisbon late in 2009. The new nomenclature enshrined in that treaty is almost designed to confuse. The European Community, the long-standing EC, still exists as one part, along with Euratom, of the “European Communities,” which in turn is one pillar of the “European Union.”

CHAPTER 8

a,

Central Europe on the Move

A almost the exact moment the Berlin Wall was being breached, November 1989, an American economist presented a talk in Washington in which he laid out ten policy instruments that he called “the Washington consensus.”! John Williamson was trying to identify a set of policies that much of the Washington community, including not just the U.S. government, but the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, politicians, and academics, could agree were prudent and effective mechanisms by which Latin American countries could develop their economies. To Williamson's surprise and chagrin, the term “Washington

Consensus” quickly entered into common international usage to refer not to his list as such, but rather to the general atmosphere of economic fundamentalism that became widespread in the 1980s during the regimes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.? The basic thrust of this neoliberalism, as it is called in Europe, was that if you get prices right by creating a free market unregulated by government intrusions, capitalist enterprises will quickly figure out how to make profits, employ workers, and energize an economy.? Although concrete prescriptions making up the Washington consensus changed over the 1990s, one thing that did not change was the confidence of Western economic and political leaders that they knew what poorer countries should do to promote growth, low inflation, and an equitable income distribution. A similar consensus existed in the political arena. It went without saying in the West that the only feasible choice for East European countries that had rejected communism was democracy, which was characterized by free elections, rule by law, and protection of human rights. Unlike the new governments that came to power in Eastern Europe following World War I, post-1989 governments came into office confronting a democratic and economically powerful West that held rather set ideas on what they should do. In the first euphoria of the revolutions, some naively believed that all the new states had to do to get on the correct path to democracy and prosperity was to hold elections and free up commerce.‘ It was not so easy.

269

270 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

POLAND GOES FIRST The members of the Solidarity government who came to power in the summer of 1989 were not entering public life for the first time. They brought with them ten years of experience in the union movement, a strong commitment to democracy, and the enthusiastic support of most Poles. On the other hand, they were limited by their lack of experience in public administration, a deficit in their understanding of parliamentary practice, and a paucity of supporters in the bureaucracy.

And they faced economic disaster. In August 1989, the month they assumed office, Poland’s annual rate of inflation reached 3,000 percent and by October the annual rate had soared to 17,000 percent.5 Imports were running far above exports, foreign debt was out of hand, and Poland was not even paying interest on that debt. Fortunately, an economist emerged who hada plan, Leszek Balcerowicz, whom Prime Minister Mazowiecki chose for his Minister of Finance. A former

Communist who quit the party to join Solidarity, but above all a technocratic economist (or “technopol”—a technical expert elevated to political power—as he called himself), Balcerowicz had been influenced in the 1980s by neoliberal economics. Already in 1988 he wrote, “reform of the Soviet type of economic system... has to be very radical, or—in other words—it must pass a high threshold in a short time.’ Working frantically during the fall of 1989, the new finance minister and his team, helped in significant measure by the American specialist in economic reform Jeffrey Sachs, put together a crash program to transform the Polish economy in one fell swoop. They hoped that a “big bang” of dramatic and simultaneous reform would not only deal with Poland’s short-term economic problems, but quickly transform Poland’s moribund centrally planned economy into a market system. Others called this strategy “shock therapy,” a term that is still used despite Balcerowicz’s distaste for its emotional overtones. On January 1, 1990, the Solidarity government put the Balcerowicz program into effect. It freed prices, froze wages, permitted companies to import and export goods without special permission, lowered tariffs, cut subsidies to households and businesses, and made the devalued zloty convertible to Western currencies. This was an astonishing move for at least two reasons. First, in a country used to “reforms” of all kinds that really changed very little, it was a windstorm of fresh air and hopeful commitment. But second, it was promulgated by a government that came to power ostensibly as the representative of workers, who suddenly saw prices jump 70 percent at the same time their wages had been frozen. From the moment the big bang got under way, Solidarity’s popularity with voters began to decline as Poland slipped into a deep recession and unemployment climbed.” On the other hand, within weeks prices started to come down, as did inflation. Goods, including agricultural products, appeared in markets and new enterprises cropped up by the thousands. Instead of complaining about standing in lines for endless hours, Poles now complained that whereas the shops were full they could not afford to buy anything. Official statistics, which showed a drop in real wages of 30 percent over the course of 1990, seemed to support this

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 271

complaint. But someone was buying, because the shops and informal sellers not only stayed open, they began expanding, leasing space, and finding new products to sell. In fact, since most Poles had participated heavily in the second economy before the reform, a phenomenon not captured in official statistics, many found that they could survive quite well in the new circumstances. Meanwhile, the Solidarity government struggled to create a working democracy. The first test was the presidential election of December 1990. Lech Watesa,

not in the government and feeling left out at home in Gdansk, began to criticize Mazowiecki, his main opponent, for what Watesa called mismanagement, appealing to those who had been hurt by the reforms. The Mazowiecki camp, on the other hand, feared that Walesa, who had called for a stronger presidency,

had authoritarian tendencies and could not be trusted. As Adam Michnik put it, Watesa “will become a destabilizing fact, creating chaos.” After a destructive campaign stressing most of the negatives of reform, Mazowiecki did not even make the runoff and Walesa was elected president. Rejected by the voters and personally hurt, Mazowiecki resigned and Walesa installed his own prime minister—but not his own minister of finance. Having won the election in part on the strength of his criticisms of shock therapy, Walesa kept Balcerowicz in place and continued to support many of his reforms. In fact, Walesa even unsuccessfully proposed that he be given special powers to implement the reforms by decree, rather than through the fast track process that parliament had established. Over the course of his five-year term in office Walesa destroyed his reputation by amply justifying Michnik’s prediction that he would be a fractious leader. It took a while for Polish public figures to learn how to work their new democracy. In the first post-1989 parliamentary election, which took place in October 1991, twenty-nine parties won at least one seat, including one called “Friends of Beer” and another called “Women Against Life’s Hardships.”? The backbone of one of the coalitions, however, the Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej—SLD), was a reformed and regenerated Social Democratic party of Poland (Socjaldemokracja Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej—-SdRP), whose youthful, energetic, and experienced leadership had seized control of the disintegrating Communist party in January 1990.10 When the SLD won the subsequent election in September 1993, in part because it successfully presented itself as competent and knowledgeable, it shocked many in the West because it seemed like the Communists were returning to power. But they weren't. The new leadership had transformed the Communists into a center-left party that led the country democratically for four years (in coalition with the Polish People’s party). But then, in the Polish version of throw the rascals out, a right-leaning coalition led by the remnants of Solidarity, now a neoliberal party with few roots in the working class, replaced them in 1997. Suddenly, Leszek Balcerowicz was back in power as minister of finance, where he pushed new reforms, although this time in cooperation with parliament rather than from the heights he had occupied in 1990. In the midst of these political flip flops, in 1995 the voters even rejected Lech Walesa, replacing him in the presidency with the Democratic Left Alliance

272 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

candidate Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist whose youthful vigor and apparent competence contrasted favorably with Walesa’s increasingly cranky and old fashioned look. These right-left-right alternations, which signaled that Poland had already become a vigorous democracy, did not stop economic reform. In fact, they may have helped. Because the process was contested, every reform possibility was subjected to interminable, bitter, even infuriating debate and modification. The efforts of the first Solidarity government to impose shock therapy were doctrinaire and undemocratic, taken by technocrats who explicitly wished to impose a capitalist system without taking working people into account. But the voters chastened them. Then, when Lech Walesa disrupted the smooth running of the political system, voters replaced him. When a new left party emerged from the ruins of the Communist party, voters chose them, and then replaced them four years later. This start and stop politics served as a learning process, slowly bringing experience in the competitive nature of electoral politics and in the compromises and accommodations that make democracy work. What seemed like endless and obfuscating debate had the effect of moderating, changing, and improving the changes that finally emerged. A good example of this learning process was the fate of large enterprise privatization. For neoliberals like Balcerowicz the creation of private property was the fundamental necessity for creating a capitalist system. At the time the first Solidarity government came to power a certain amount of spontaneous privatization had already begun, as workers’ councils and managers took advantage of changes during the later days of communism to assert their control over enterprises. But more than eight thousand companies, a significant number of them large firms in the politically important heavy industry and mining sectors, still remained under state control. Despite his big bang philosophy, Balcerowicz had left large firm privatization out of his initial shock therapy plan. His idea was first to open up the economy, and then to move on to large firm privatization. This second phase of the plan began on August 1, 1990, when the newly formed Ministry of Ownership Transformation began a process that it claimed would privatize the Polish economy in three years. But it was not to be. The program bogged down and in the end, “no single overarching privatization program ever got off the ground.” Despite Poland’s reputation as the home of “shock therapy,” it actually experienced what one author has called “gradual privatization by accident.”!! At first, this was a cause for concern, since creating private property seemed to be the sine qua non of transforming centrally planned economies. But the delay had a silver lining. It enabled Poland to firm up its banking system and to gain both political and economic experience in managing its economy. It permitted a stock market to establish itself on a solid footing, and it gave time for entrepreneurs to create hundreds of thousands of new private enterprises without getting bogged down in fighting over privatization schemes, which often led to chicanery and corruption. Not that Poland did not have its share of corruption, but Poland’s delayed privatization experience permitted it to learn as it went and

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 273

to avoid some of the serious mistakes made elsewhere. As Mitchell A. Orenstein

puts it, “slowing the privatization programs and subjecting them to rigorous democratic tests forced them to meet tough performance criteria.”!? In the final analysis, therefore, despite criticism of being a laggard, the Polish privatization experience actually produced better results in terms of economic growth than was achieved elsewhere. At least better success as measured statistically. After a sharp decline in GDP in 1990 and 1991, growth turned positive in 1992 and remained so until the end of the decade. By 1995 GDP was back to the 1989 level, and by 2000 it exceeded the 1989 level by a good 20 percent, the best performance in Eastern Europe.!3 But many Poles felt that the changes accompanying the new property relations were not well captured in statistics. Elizabeth C. Dunn’s fascinating study of the priva-

tization of one of Poland’s main producers of baby foods shows why that was the case. In 1992 Gerber Foods bought Alima, a baby food producer in a small town of Rzeszoéw. Gerber executives thought that since Rzeszéw was similar to its home office in Fremont, Michigan, it would be possible to import their methods

to Poland and create a well functioning enterprise. But as Dunn points out, the socialist firm was nothing like a capitalist firm. It operated not only to produce baby food and to provide a work place for local people, but also to support small regional farmers and as an organizer of leisure and entertainment. Alina was not an economic enterprise out to make a profit, but in essence a community support system. When Gerber started to introduce what it considered efficiency enhancing changes, such as demanding high-quality fruit from suppliers on time, instituting an accounting system based on international norms, standardizing procedures, and classifying workers statistically, most employees felt they were being dehumanized, their skills devalued, and their community destroyed. Eventually Gerber gave up and sold Alima to a Swiss firm, leaving behind a trail of dispirited workers and former employees and an entirely disrupted way of daily life for most in Rzeszéw. The lesson of Alima is that the transition to a market economy is not just a matter of creating a stable currency, stabilizing the banking system, and enforcing contracts, fundamental though these things may be. As Dunn puts it, transition also means “changing the very foundations of what it means to be a person."4 Still, Poland accomplished a great deal in the first ten years of its transformation. One of the most stabilizing for the long haul was the remarkable pattern of good relations it established with its neighbors, especially Germany. During World War II the Nazis, operating on the principle that the Poles were not quite human, went far beyond any previous style of domination, killing six million Polish citizens and purposefully degrading the rest. Then, when the Red Army gave the Poles a chance to retaliate in 1944 and 1945, they wreaked terrible vengeance against the Germans. Gomulka’s explicit policy in 1945 was to get rid of them all, and he almost succeeded. More than 8 million Germans fled or were expelled from Poland, leaving perhaps a million dead.'5 Therefore, it is quite remarkable that within two years of coming to power the Solidarity government

274 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

was able to sign two treaties with Germany publicly and officially stating that the two parties had seriously wronged each other in countless ways, that they were sorry for it, and that they intended to do better in the future. In the first of these agreements, Germany finally accepted the validity of the Oder-Neisse border and in the second Germany agreed to assist Poland in its quest to install a social market economy, effectively becoming Poland’s unofficial spokesman in the European Union. In return, Poland agreed to a full menu of minority rights for Germans remaining in Poland. This dramatic change in relations between what most people considered traditional enemies paralleled the treaty of friendship that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer had signed in 1963 ending centuries of Franco-German hostility. Together these related agreements created a powerful band of peaceful neighbors across Europe's northern tier. Even before it repaired its relations to the west, Poland had turned its attention to the east.!6 As early as September 1989 Adam Michnik received a thunderous welcome in Kiev at the founding meeting of Rukh, the Ukrainian nationalist party, and in October 1990 foreign minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski, who should get much of the credit for Poland’s diplomatic successes in the post-1989 period, signed a “state-to-state” declaration of friendship with not-yet-fully-independent

Ukraine. Poland was the first state to recognize Ukrainian independence in December 1991 and has maintained good relations with that country ever since. The same can not be said for Belarus, but when Belarus became independent its first international act was to sign a joint declaration of friendship with Poland and the two have maintained strained but correct relations since. In this way Poland separated itself from Russia with a cordon of friendly states and ameliorated many longstanding conflicts. The change in Poland's geopolitical position was remarkable, fundamental, and historic. Instead of being squeezed between an aggressive Soviet Union and a racist Nazi Germany, by the mid-1990s Poland found itself more secure in its new borders than it had ever been.

HUNGARY TRIES GRADUALISM “Negotiated Revolution” is the term often applied to the change of regime in Hungary. It is not that Hungary did not experience crowds of people on the streets. The tens of thousands that turned out for the independence day holiday in March 1989 and the reburial of Imre Nagy three months later were good examples. But

the regime change in Hungary was actually completed through negotiations among the reform elements of the Communist party and a self selected group of opposition and social elites. Nothing showed this more than the selection of Jozsef Antall as prime minister. Unlike Lech Watesa or Vaclav Havel, Antall was

virtually unknown to the general public. From a noted Catholic family with Smallholder party connections, Antall was a historian of medicine and served for many years as director of a medical museum. As a young man he showed an interest in politics, but, except for a brief moment in 1956, he did not participate in any opposition activities. In fact, some of the founders of the Hungarian

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 275

Democratic Forum (MDF) did not even know who he was. However, because of his solid background as a historian and his reputation as a good negotiator, the party asked him to represent it at the roundtable discussions in 1989. From there his rise was meteoric. When the MDF won the May 1990 election by taking more than 40 percent of the seats in the new parliament, it selected him as Hungary’s first non-Communist prime minster in more than forty years. By the time of that first election Hungary already had several clearly defined parties. On the left there were the socialists (Magyar Szocialista Part—MSzP), the reform element of which exercised power until the elections. In the center was the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) representing the democratic opposition of Budapest intellectuals who had been linked with the underground journal Beszélé. The Alliance of Young Democrats (FIDESz) was the quirky left-leaning party of bearded students and jeans-wearing youth. On the right, the Smallholders and Christian Democrats had been reconstituted from traditional parties, while the Democratic Forum represented the mainstream of patriotic Christian values. Given the revulsion most Hungarians felt for communism, the socialists didn't stand a chance in the first election, even though they had successfully negotiated the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungarian soil in March 1990 (the Soviet troops were out by June 1991). The Free Democrats, capitalizing on their laurels as oppositionists, did well, but the clear winner was the Democratic Forum, which

joined with the Smallholders and the Christian Democrats to form a centerright government. Even still, the coalition did not have the two-thirds majority it needed to pass fundamental legislation. After cutting a deal with Janos Kis, head of the Free Democrats, that gave the presidency to a Free Democrat in return for support in parliament, Antall was ready to implement his program.!” But what was Antall’s program? Antall himself was not a populist in the sense that it is used in Hungary, but his party was heir to the national-populist traditions of the 1930s. The Democratic Forum was originally put together by writers concerned with what they considered past injustices to the Hungarian nation,

such as the Treaty of Trianon after World War I that broke up the Hungarian half of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the fate of Hungarians living across the border in Romania, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia. Revising the Trianon Treaty had been the foreign policy mantra of the authoritarian Horthy regime of the 1930s, and it almost immediately reappeared in the speeches and comments of both Antall and his foreign minister (who happened to be his brother-in-law). For example, Antall liked to describe himself as the prime minister “in spirit” of 15 million Hungarians.!8 Since the population of Hungary was only a little more than 10 million, observers both inside and outside Hungary took this to be a hint that Antall sought border adjustments with his neighbors. Indeed, despite increasingly explicit warnings from Western powers, he and his Democratic Forum colleagues did harbor the unrealistic hope that it might be possible to redraw Hungary's borders. This focus on old fashioned, inward looking goals seemed anachronistic to many Hungarians in the shadow of the European Union. Even more damaging to the Democratic Forum’s international reputation were overtly

276 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

anti-Semitic comments by its vice chairman, Istvan Csurka. As one Democratic Forum minister put it, “It is very difficult to negotiate with the IMF if the Vice Chairman of the leading coalition party describes the IMF as the strike force of World Jewry.) Suffering from political inexperience, Antall had trouble maintaining his party's cohesion. In 1993 Csurka was dismissed and founded his own party, taking the most extreme part of the Forum's membership with him. Consumers were outraged when the government suddenly raised gasoline prices by more than 50 percent just before a three day weekend, leading to a spectacular strike by Budapest taxi drivers. The Forum’s clumsy effort to control the public media, much of which was already in the hands of private owners, left it looking both heavy-handed and ineffective. By the time the 1994 election rolled around, the Democratic Forum had lost its credibility.2° It seemed for a while that FIDESz, the Young Democrats, would be the beneficiary of this collapse, but in 1992 and 1993 its dominant figure, Viktor Orban, changed the party’s orientation from a more or less open format to a disciplined party dominated by his increasingly populist ideas.2! Neither the Forum nor FIDESz realized that nationalist issues did not yet resonate with most Hungarians, who remained focused on their economic situation and with associating the country with Europe. When the May 1994 election arrived, therefore, outsiders were surprised when the socialists achieved a substantial plurality. But by this time the reform communists had created a modern, professional social democratic party, much as they had in Poland. Béla Kiraly, a general who had to flee Hungary in 1956 because he led Budapest troops against the Red Army invasion, put it this way: “Never during the four years of the first post-Communist parliament were they [the socialists] demagogic obstructionists; they rather behaved as a Western-

type loyal opposition,...prepared, moderate, practical [and] constructive.” The socialists not only projected an aura of competence, unlike Antall’s regime, but they advocated a much more aggressive policy of associating Hungary with

Europe, something that appealed to most Hungarians. The Free Democrats (SzDSz), who had not yet lost as much popularity as they were about to, joined the socialists as the junior partner in the new coalition government. The most immediate concern to most Hungarians in the first few years after the negotiated revolution, of course, was their economic situation. With the collapse of the East European markets and the sudden need to compete in the West, unemployment jumped and the standard of living slipped. Antall was a conservative, but he was not a neoliberal, like Balcerowicz. Furthermore, because of the reforms that the Communist government had made in the 1980s, Hungarian professionals knew more about how the Western economies worked than was the case elsewhere in Eastern Europe.?3 Because Hungary had been a member of both the IMF and the World Bank since 1982, it already had a solid banking system, for example. Therefore, the Democratic Forum did not introduce shock therapy. Under pressure from its coalition partner, the Smallholders party, whose only program was the restitution of land to farmers, it did create a voucher program

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 277

for the restitution of land to previous owners and for the purchase of private dwellings. But when it came to large privatization it decided to proceed by traditional means, that is, by simply selling state-owned industries.24 This was an interesting decision because it meant ramping up foreign investment, something that the more extreme members of the Democratic Forum thought would “sell out” Hungary to foreigners. But once the regime realized that the West was not going to provide any sort of Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe, it took the next best option, foreign investment. When buyers purchased shares in a Hungarian firm the proceeds went directly to the state, thus giving the government a one-off form of income that could be put toward reducing the debt. Because buyers were putting up their own money, the first owners of the newly privatized enterprises often brought management skills with them. Their primary goal was to make a profit, not to strip their new purchase of assets. The success of this gradual sell off of enterprises was assisted by a regulated stock market. The Democratic Forum

put in place a regulatory agency to keep the stock market under control, with the positive result that chicanery was kept to a minimum (not eliminated) and markets quickly stabilized.

This narrative glosses over the complex and ever changing details of Hungary's privatization schemes, and it does not mention the fact that another reason the socialists won in 1994 was that the Democratic Forum had not actually solved many of Hungary's economic difficulties. These had been made worse by the aggressive and unforgiving approach the European Union took at first toward

Hungary (and the other post-Communist states). For example, the EU sought free entry for its own goods into Hungary, but imposed tariffs on its imports of key items from Hungary. Making it hard for Hungary to earn foreign currency, the European bankers nevertheless insisted that Hungary repay its debts in full (unlike in the case of Poland, where about half of Poland’s foreign debt was excused). Under intense pressure from the IMF, in 1995 the new socialist government was forced to introduce a series of austerity measures, such as temporary surcharge tax on imports (to cut consumption). The political fallout was severe, but within a relatively short time Hungary’s debt was under control, at least for the time being. Even though the socialists lost the next electoral go-round in 1998 to Orban and his FIDESz party, by the end of the decade privatization was more or less completed, and the country was enjoying significant economic growth.

FIDESz had spent its time in the mid-1990s by filling the gap on the right that opened up when the Democratic Forum collapsed after Antall’s premature death. As a new party, never associated with the Communist regime or any prewar tendency, it was free to claim the space long occupied in Hungarian politics by what in the 1930s was called the rural position, that is, anti-Communist, populist, and primarily Catholic in orientation. By the mid-1990s the party had become the organ of its charismatic leader, Viktor Orban, which proved to be a key advantage for FIDESz. After its consolidation in the early 1990s, it has not been rent by the interpersonal conflicts and defections to the same extent as other parties. In the election of May 1998, therefore, FIDESz brought not only its

278 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

conservative strengths to the campaign but also a powerful critique of the socialist government's austerity policies (which nevertheless had stabilized Hungary’s economy). Dominating the right wing of the Hungarian electorate, it was able to form a new government after narrowly defeating the incumbent socialists.”

CZECHOSLOVAKIA SPLITS IN TWO Few countries have enjoyed as positive a reputation as Czechoslovakia, especially its Czech part. Founded after World War I by a distinguished and highly respected leader, Tomas G. Masaryk, it was the only country in Eastern Europe during the interwar period that maintained a democracy, albeit one highly managed by Masaryk and the leaders of its five main political parties. When it was bullied into submission by Hitler in 1938 and 1939 the Czech portion retained its reputation as Hitler's first victim through the war, while at the same time remaining relatively undamaged and prosperous. In 1945, Edvard Bene§, a disciple of Masaryk and thus attractive from a distance, once again took power, but presided over three years of nationalistic excesses until his government fell when Stalin-backed Communists seized power in 1948.26 Despite conducting one of the worst purges of innocent people outside the Soviet Union itself, Communist Czechoslovakia regained its good reputation when in 1968 reformers briefly opened the media during the Prague Spring only to be squashed again, this time by a military occupation by its Communist neighbors. During the next twenty years Czechoslovakia experienced a thoroughly repressive regime, but it retained its positive standing through the efforts of Charter 77, led by Vaclav Havel. Then in 1989 the Velvet Revolution brought down the Communist regime without significant violence and elevated Havel, one of the most sensitive as well as politically

unprepared presidents a country has ever had, to its highest office. So, despite a checkered history that includes ethnic cleansing, political manipulations, and episodes of cowardice and accommodation, “Masaryk and Benes’s national narrative of a martyred nation of democrats remain|ed] compelling.” The government of national understanding that assumed power at the end of 1989 was dominated by a mixed group of dissidents who strongly believed in a Czech tradition of democracy but who had no political experience and no practical agenda. The suddenness of the Civic Forum’s accession to power, the plurality of viewpoints among its members, and its interim nature (elections were coming in June 1990) prevented it from jumping right into a shock therapy program like the Solidarity government in Poland had. Instead, the neoliberal point of view backed by the Washington Consensus became one of two competing strategies. It held that the market would solve all economic problems if only it could be introduced quickly and without restrictions, while the gradualist view maintained that Czechoslovakia should take its time to make sure it did not harm its citizens by poorly thought out measures. The neoliberal view was championed by Vaclav Klaus, an American-trained economist who had spent most of his time under communism at the state bank. Valtr Komarek, an economist

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 279

from the Prague Spring generation, led the gradualists. Over the course of 1990, however, Komarek proved no match for Klaus politically, even though a majority of the Civic Forum, including President Havel, initially supported a gradualist approach. In June Czechoslovakia’s first free election since 1946 swept the Civic Forum into power, but by this time it was dominated by Klaus. In September,

after making gestures at bringing important interest groups like unions into the discussion, parliament overwhelmingly adopted two laws setting January 1, 1991, as the start date for Czechoslovakia’s economic transformation, exactly one year after Poland started its shock therapy. On that date prices were liberalized, a value-added tax and a personal income tax were introduced, and the currency was made convertible inside the country. But this was not the shock therapy that Vaclav Klaus might have introduced had he been left entirely to his own devices. He and his neoliberal allies would have liked to eliminate subsidies to state industries, for example, but after almost a year of negotiations, he had been forced to maintain them. He also made sure that mothers with children and pensioners kept their cash payments both for social stability and to encourage them to stay out of the job market, thus keeping unemployment low; protected indigenous industries from world competition by introducing a 20 percent import tax; reformed social security and health care; and took measures to keep real wages stable. Klaus talked a good neoliberal game. Indeed, it made him famous. But he undercut his own philosophy by continuing to shield inefficient practices right up to his fall from power in 1998.

In one area, however, Klaus outstripped all other post-1989 reformers, and that was in his dramatic privatization program.?8 Laws passed in 1990 had restored property seized by the Communists to its former owners and privatized small enterprises like auto repair shops and restaurants. Both were conducted in standard ways by auctions and other forms of sale or transfer. But his most original scheme was voucher privatization, enacted in the Large Privatization Act of February 1991. Every Czechoslovak citizen received coupons worth 1,000 points with which he or she could purchase shares in state owned companies. To be valid, the vouchers had to be registered with the state for 1,035 crowns, which was less than one-half a month's salary for an average worker. Each enterprise submitted a privatization plan to the government showing how it wished to privatize its assets. The Plzen brewery, for example, offered 40 percent of its shares to the public through vouchers, 20 percent to investment funds, and 40 percent to investors through banks, of which 5 percent was set aside for its employees. The East Slovak Ironworks, on the other hand, decided to offer all of its available shares to the public through vouchers.22 Administrators set the first price for an ownership share at 100 points, then adjusted it in several iterations to clear the market. The first wave of privatization using this system took place during 1992, with the shares being distributed in May 1993. A second wave was completed in the Czech lands (not in Slovakia) in 1995. At first, citizens were lukewarm about the voucher idea, but late in 1991 an investment firm called Harvard Capital and Consulting [no connection with

280 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Harvard University] promised to return 10,000 crowns—almost ten times the original price—to any investor who had placed his or her vouchers with Harvard and one year later remained dissatisfied with the results. Suddenly citizens were lining up at post offices around the country to register their vouchers. Eventually more than four hundred investment firms popped up, some promising even higher returns. In the end almost 9 million Czechs and Slovaks out of a population approaching 15 million had registered their vouchers. While the privatization wheels turned, so did the political gears. During 1990 President Havel decided it would be better for the Civic Forum to have one chairman rather than leadership by committee. Naturally, in his view, this chairman would be from the old Charter 77 group. Vaclav Klaus had other ideas. He immediately got busy traveling through the provinces to sell himself and his program to local Civic Forum clubs. He argued that his program was truly European,

not an artifact of leftist Prague dissidents. As a result, and to Havel’s surprise, in September 1990 the Civic Forum convention overwhelmingly named Klaus chairman instead of Havel’s candidate. Klaus interpreted this, along with Civic Forum’s earlier electoral victory, as confirmation of the correctness of his neoliberal philosophy. He purged the Civic Forum of its left alternative movement and of its remaining Communist members. Unable to sustain Havel’s vision of an umbrella organization, in February 1992 Civic Forum split into two elements, a right wing party dominated by Klaus and one containing the left-leaning activists of the Velvet Revolution in their own party. The two agreed to maintain a coalition government until elections in June 1992, when they, along with several other parties, ran as separate entities. Klaus’s new Civic Democratic party, in alliance with the Christian Democrats, handily won and remained in power for another six years.

Simultaneously with this demonstration of Klaus’s energetic political skills, the question emerged of how to deal with the continued prominence of Communists in public life. In Poland Tadeusz Mazowiecki had proposed drawing a thick black line across the page to separate the Communist era from the new era of democratic rebirth. But many on the right did not agree with him, especially in Czechoslovakia. After rumors that the Czechoslovak State Security office (StB) was destroying files and leaking documents, and after endless rumors, leaks, and fiery speeches, in October 1991 parliament passed the Lustration Law.?° The idea was to throw light on (lustrate) the StB’s murky past and to prevent those who were its active agents from serving in government or other public posts (such as professor). The law sought to identify collaborators but did not shine its light on corrupt party members, brutal policeman, crooked enterprise managers, or other possibly unsavory elements of the Communist apparatus. Problems immediately arose. Was someone whose name simply appeared on a list a collaborator? How about someone who signed a document but provided no useful information? Or

someone who met with an agent not knowing he was an agent? How accurate were the lists? Who had the right to see them? What happened when information was leaked for political reasons? These and many other questions provided ample

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 281

opportunity for political blackmail, smear campaigns, and rumor mongering. Lustration embittered Czech politics for many years, as it did in several other countries, notably Poland. It did very little to provide justice to those who suffered under communism however. The elections of 1992 that reaffirmed the power of the neoliberals at the federal level also took place in both of the two constituent elements of the federation that had been created after the Prague Spring: the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Klaus dominated in the Czech lands, but in Slovakia a new leader emerged, a charismatic populist named Vladimir Meciar. As a young man, Me¢ciar supported Alexander Dub¢éek during the Prague Spring and consequently was purged from the Communist party. Eventually he became a small town lawyer and in 1989 he joined Public Against Violence (VPN), the Slovak equivalent of Civic Forum. With the collapse of communism the politically astute Meciar became Slovak Minister of the Interior, and then in 1990 he successfully cam-

paigned for the post of Prime Minister of Slovakia. Despite his Prague Spring credentials Meciar remained an opportunist at heart, neither a true reformer nor a Bratislava intellectual. When opponents pushed him aside in 1991 he split from VPN and formed his own party, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (Hnutie za demokratické Slovakia—HZDS), which he rode to victory in 1992. Slovakia had a different history from the Czech lands, even though both were

joined together in the same country for more than seventy years.3! It had been part of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not the Austrian half, and was more agricultural and more Catholic than the Czech lands. During World War II it had been quasi-independent under a fascist government led by a Catholic priest, which nevertheless was viewed positively by some Slovak nationalists. Whereas anti-Communist feeling ran high in the Czech lands, in Slovakia many looked upon the Communist era as a time of progress. Industry had blossomed and literacy rates had climbed. Slovak politicians harbored a feeling of resentment toward Prague, sensing, probably correctly, that the Czechs had never taken them seriously. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution this became obvious to Slovaks in many ways. For example, early in 1990 President Havel announced that Czechoslovakia would curb its production of arms, especially heavy equipment. This may have been morally admirable, but since 70 percent of the country’s arms production was in Slovakia this policy did not go down well there. Meciar played on these sentiments with vague but decisive sounding remarks, demanded that Slovakia become independent, and criticized his Bratislava opponents as being out of touch with real Slovaks. Negotiations had been going on since 1989 over exactly what the relationship between the Czech lands and Slovakia should be, even over what its name should be.32 Now with the headstrong Klaus and the xenophobic MeC¢iar in charge in the two republics, discussions came to a head. Despite the fact that most members of the public probably favored keeping the country together, as did President Havel,

the two prime ministers agreed between themselves that it would be better if each half went its own way. In control of their respective legislatures, they were

282 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

able to make the necessary legal changes and on January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite complaints that this Velvet Divorce was not done in a democratic way, it almost certainly was the right thing

to do. Each country was now free to go its own way without spending endless years fruitlessly negotiating every issue in an atmosphere heavily burdened with nationalist resentments.

Slovakia The benefits of separation were not immediately apparent in Slovakia. Political life in the new country was in shambles. Meciar’s party, consisting mostly of old style former Communists and rent-seeking opportunists supported by rural and provincial voters, was unprepared for anything except stealing what it could. Steven Fish has called it an “ochlocracy, or rule by the rabble.” Fish’s judgment is harsh: “Slovakia was governed by a coalition of misanthropes and harlequins, headed by a politically wily but mentally unbalanced prime minister.”33 With that prime minister opposed to privatization and foreign investment, and with unemployment rising, the economy plunged into decline. Meciar did not believe that these difficulties were something that needed fixing. He blamed them on various enemies, particularly on Slovakia’s Hungarian minority (only ten percent of the population). He found a good deal of support for this accusation among the Slovak public and even among the opposition parties. Even prior to the breakup of Czechoslovakia, the Slovak parliament had approved a new constitution that pointedly said it was being established by “the Slovak Nation,” that is, not by “the citizens of Slovakia,” which would have included the Hungarian, Roma, and smaller minorities. These were downgraded to the second class status of “nationalities” rather than “nations.” The constitution went so far as to state that protection of the “rights of citizens” should not lead to “the endangerment of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Slovak Republic,” opening the door to mistreatment of minorities.34 After independence, the parliament went on to pass laws requiring names be registered in Slovak forms, that all road signs be in Slovak, and that all communications with the state be in Slovak. These denials of minority rights received severe criticism from such European organizations as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but Meciar passed such complaints off as simply another effort by “enemies” to undermine Slovakia.

In March 1994 an anti-Meciar coalition managed to take control of the government and within weeks had restored the use of non-Slovak names and place signs. It also tried to launch a second privatization wave and secured a significant IMF loan. Almost immediately Slovakia’s international reputation took a turn for the better. But the interlude was short-lived. To get into and remain in power, the new government had needed the support in parliament of the Hungarian party, and for this Meciar accused them of selling out Slovakia to Hungary. In good populist style he also told voters he would lower taxes 25 percent, stop any further privatization, and restrict foreign investment, thus saving Slovakia for

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 283

the Slovaks. Campaigning with the slogan “Slovakia—Go For It,” his party took three times as many votes as the next highest party in the September 1994 election. It turned out, of course, that Meciar was not really opposed to privatization. What he meant was that he opposed transparent privatization. During the next four years before he definitively fell from power in 1998 he continued his practice of privatizing the Slovak economy by giving it away to friends and supporters. Seemingly freed up by his electoral victory, he also did his best to personalize his power, attacking recalcitrant members of parliament with phony legalistic ploys, sending thugs to beat up inconvenient journalists, restricting the power of the president, undermining the ability of enforcement agencies to investigate fraud and other misdemeanors, and, as Fish puts it, purging his party of anyone with a triple digit 1Q.%5

Despite Meciar’s success in increasing his personal power, three indigenous elements were able to put modest brakes on him: the Slovak Constitutional Court, the opposition parties, and the country’s president, Michal Kovac. Despite efforts

to restrain it, the constitutional court often ruled against Meciar and despite sometimes outrageous provocations the well-established existence of parliament continued to provide the opposition a forum.%6 President Kovac, even though he was originally a member of MeC¢iar’s party, proved to be an independent figure who soon became the prime minister's public enemy number one. In a bizarre incident, in 1995 Michal Kova¢, Jr., the president’s son who was under indictment in Germany for fraud, was kidnapped and tortured before being released in Vienna. No smoking gun was ever found, but Meciar put every obstacle in the way of the investigation of the Slovak secret service's involvement and even-

tually issued a blanket pardon to everyone and anyone who might have been involved. By the time of the September 1998 election, acts like this had soured enough of the Slovak public that the hitherto fractious opposition parties could finally combine into a coalition that was able to push Meciar out, even though Meciar’s party won the most votes. Only then did liberalizing reforms begin in Slovakia. The country’s reputation improved so rapidly that Slovakia was able to enter the European Union at the same time as its former bedfellow, the Czech Republic. Meciar did not disappear, but he was never able to return to power as the Godfather of the Slovak nation.

The Czech Republic Slovakia’s experiences with Meciar from 1992 to 1998 ruined the countrys already not too stellar reputation. Early in 1998 U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Slovakia “was a hole in the map of Europe” and later that year the EU removed Slovakia from the list of acceptable candidates for accession because it did not meet the standard of being a democracy.?”7 The Czech Republic and its leader, on the other hand, enjoyed a superb international reputation. The World Bank considered Vaclav Klaus the genius of postCommunist reform, the man who got it right and who was brilliantly leading his country on the path to prosperity and stability.38 And the Czech Republic

284 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

did look stable for several years, with modest but apparently solid economic growth, low debt, and unemployment below 4 percent. But looks were deceiving. As a neoliberal, Klaus rejected government regulation on principle. The market, if left alone, would sort things out fairly and efficiently. Accordingly, he resisted establishing ground rules for the many investment firms that sprang up, permitted the stock market to remain unregulated, and prevented serious investigations into the many forms of corruption that began to come to light. One of the ideas behind the voucher plan was to put ownership in the hands of ordinary Czechs, but what actually happened was that most Czechs placed their vouchers with banks or investment companies, which then found ways to finagle the small shareholders out of their stakes.39 Harvard Capital and Consulting turned out to be a scam conducted by a young man now known as “the pirate of Prague.” After stripping Czech industries of hundreds of millions of dollars, this entrepreneur fled to the tax haven of the Bahamas and left his small voucher investors high and dry. Examples of self-dealing by high government officials or members of Klaus’s party began appearing. In a particularly egregious example, the head of the central privatization registry was arrested coming out of a Chinese restaurant after a business meeting with 8 million crowns in cash in his briefcase.4° But Klaus proved to be a master of spin control, dismissing the often highly publicized incidents as isolated cases, or even products of “bad journalism.” Worse from a structural point of view, many of the privatized industries actually ended up in the hands of banks, not entrepreneurial managers. Foreign investment, which usually brought with it an international standard of management skill, lagged, especially in comparison with Poland and Hungary. As a result, much of the creative energy of Czech

financiers and managers focused on ways to game the system rather than on profitability or efficiency, and many of the old clunkers of Czech heavy industry continued their inefficient ways. An excellent example of the costs of keeping privatization in the hands of local banks rather than profit seeking owners was the contrasting fate of Skoda automobile works and three other Czech car, truck and motorcycle companies.*! Volkswagen bought Skoda late in 1990, before the voucher program was up to speed, while the other three companies were, so to speak, voucherized, the argument being that “we don’t want to sell out the national heritage to foreigners.” Under the management of various banks, consortia and other owners one of those three has since gone out of business and the other two remain marginal producers. Skoda, on the other hand, after thorough modernization by the Germans and good leadership by its Czech and German executives, produced 570,000 cars in 2010, employs some 30,000 persons, almost all of them Czech, and is even competing favorably with some Volkswagen products with its high quality but relatively inexpensive cars. In other words, despite Klaus's stellar international reputation, his ideological leadership proved damaging to the Czech economy, which in the 1990s grew at a rate of about one-half that of less ideologically pure Poland.

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 285

Finally, after an egregious series of frauds approved and even fomented by government officials that resulted not only in the state having to assume responsibility for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses but also in the state losing control of a significant portion of the banking system, the government found itself early in 1997 unable to cope with a balance of payments and exchange rate crisis.42 After spending another billion dollars in an unsuccessful effort to shore up its undervalued currency the country fell into recession. Then it was revealed that Klaus’s party had tried to hide the source of two major donations, one of which turned out to be from a steel magnate who won a privatization tender, and, worse, that the party had been illegally salting away substantial amounts of money in a secret Swiss bank account.*? These revelations forced Klaus to resign and in November 1997 a caretaker government took over until the elections scheduled for mid-1998. Surprisingly, despite all, Klaus’s neoliberal coalition won the most seats in parliament in that election but he proved unable to form a government. Instead the former prime minister agreed to lead a responsible opposition and a minority government led by the Social Democratic party began to reshape the Czech economy In retrospect, most scholars today view Klaus’s neoliberal program as a failure, not the great success it was deemed in the early 1990s. One of the reasons was that he and his party remained in power essentially from 1990 to the end of 1998 without effective challenge. Until the election of 1998 the divided and squabbling opposition proved unable to put its mutual antagonisms aside to create a viable electoral majority. Part of the problem was that, unlike in Hungary and Poland, the Czech Communist party did not reform itself, maintaining ten to fifteen percent of the vote with its antediluvian program. This lessened the ability of the less doctrinaire left, the Social Democrats, to form a government, although in 1996 it had achieved a good percentage of the votes. In Hungary and Poland power alternated during the 1990s between right-leaning and left-leaning parties. The heat generated by these alternations made Polish and Hungarian politics appear dysfunctional compared to the single-minded rule in the Czech Republic, but it had the positive result of forcing the contenders to accommodate to each other. Klaus’s party, like Meciar’s, had little difficulty in adjusting the rules of the game to favor itself, turning the voucher privatization scheme into a funding bonanza for itself and its allies. Poland and Hungary were not without their scandals, but their scale was limited compared to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The irony of these different experiences is that the main variable was the role played by the ousted Communist parties. In both Poland and Hungary, reform elements in the old Communist parties had been able to gain experience in politics and governance before 1989 and were more ready to assume new roles as social democrats than their colleagues from communist Czechoslovakia, who matured in aless open environment. The robust competition between the social democrats and their center right opponents in Poland and Hungary tended to constrain each group from exploiting the state for narrow gain.44 Entrepreneurs and businessmen, working within a reasonable regulatory environment this competition

286 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

engendered, were able to concentrate on creating value rather than stealing it, as was the case in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where the Communist parties

either did not reform at all or did so only belatedly. In other words, vigorous confrontational politics leading to alternations in power was the key ingredient in creating democracy and economic success in East Central Europe.

SLOVENIA MAKES IT INTO CENTRAL EUROPE Slovenia's greatest success after its separation from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 was to change its international perception from that of a Balkan country to that of a Central European one. In contrast to its Yugoslav neighbor Croatia, which remained closely associated with Balkan politics, Slovenia managed to edge into the first group of post-Communist countries to enter the European

Union and to become the first East European country to adopt the Euro. Significantly richer in per capita income than its former Yugoslav partners, and even than its future Central European ones, its leadership made a conscious decision to walk away from the Balkans as fast as it could. As in the cases of Poland and Hungary, a reformed Communist party was one of the reasons

this could happen. In Slovenia’s first free election, conducted at more or less the same time as others were being held in Eastern Europe but while Slovenia was still inside Yugoslavia, it elected the head of the Slovene Communist party as its new president. That was perhaps not surprising, but unlike anywhere else voters kept this moderate figure in office until 2002. And it was not a member of the opposition or of the right wing who served as prime minister from 1992 to 2002 and dominated Slovenian politics during that period, but another reform Communist, Janez Drnovsek. Unlike in Slovakia, both of these former Communists proved to be democratically inclined, favorable to entry into Europe, and amenable to market-style economies. DrnovSek proved especially adept in the fragmented Slovenian political arena at reaching agreements across the spectrum. Slovenia began to work on its privatization program even before independence, but by the time DrnovSek took power in 1992 parliament had remained bitterly divided over whether the process should favor employers and employees or should give over privatized companies to investment firms, like in Czechoslovakia. DrnovSek demonstrated his skill by creating a coalition with the Christian Democrats on the right (they called employee buyouts a return to communism) and the United List on the left (they strongly supported a role for workers). By November of 1992 this unlikely grouping passed a compromise law on privatization that combined a voucher plan, employee buyouts, auctions, and socially useful distributions into a complex but in the long run highly effective privatization plan. Even though the plan did not actually get into operation for two years due to legislative roadblocks, by the end of the decade Slovenia had successfully completed its privatization program and was experiencing rapid economic growth.

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 287

Many consider Slovenia the most successful newly democratic country in Eastern Europe, but this does not mean its transition has been smooth sailing. Three particular issues have troubled the waters: (1) the influx of refugees from earlier years and from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, (2) the anti-pluralist demands of the Slovenian Catholic hierarchy, and (3) the vigorous rhetoric of the far right. Because of its higher standard of living, Slovenia was a destination for economic refugees from other parts of Yugoslavia for many years, accounting for perhaps a quarter million individuals by 1990. Slovenia also took in about 60,000 refugees from the Yugoslav wars. The new Slovenian constitution of 1991 says that the Slovenian state is created by its citizens, not by the Slovenian nation, but the problem is that Slovenia has never recognized the Juznjaki (Southerners) as

citizens. Despite protests from European human rights organizations and even a decision by the Slovenian constitutional court, the immigrants have remained legally invisible. Worse, right wing nationalists have continually railed against them as a threat to the purity of the Slovenian nation. The Catholic Church has not only supported this argument, but has also tried to stake a claim as having a uniquely authentic position as the arbiter of Slovenian morals and as the “genuine repository of national identity. 45 The program of the Slovenian church hierarchy consists of its traditional demand to ban abortion, its insistence on including Catholic education in public schools, and its far reaching effort to reclaim substantial lands taken from it not only in Communist times but even in the distant past. The combination of Catholic and right wing rhetoric has provided a powerful anti-pluralist dimension that has roiled Slovenian politics, but so far without destroying its fundamentally democratic character. Abortion remains legal, for example, and religious education has not been mandated for public schools. Viewed from close up, Slovenian politics has been turbulent, but as time goes by it increasingly appears that democratic norms have taken root. And Slovenia remains what it was before it joined the Central European ranks: the richest country in Eastern Europe.

THE BIG STEP: INTO THE EUROPEAN UNION Almost from the first days after the collapse of communism, the goal of every East European country was to “return to Europe.” What they meant was not to rejoin the Europe of the 1930s, although political parties eventually emerged that would like to return to those fascist days, nor to return to the Europe of 1918, when the first approximations of democracy in the region began their troubled lives. What they mean was to join NATO, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and, ultimately, the European Union. In other words, they wanted to join all the transnational institutions of shared sovereignty that make up the network of negotiating nodes we now call Europe. But these organizations achieved their contemporary form well after the division of Europe into eastern and western halves during the Cold War. The newly independent countries of Eastern Europe

288 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

were not, in any practical sense, returning to something with which they had had experience. Rather they faced the problem of restructuring themselves to fit into a new, peaceful, economically integrated structure with its strong emphasis on human rights that did not exist when they “left” Europe in the late 1940s. The security issue facing both eastern and western Europe during the Cold War was quite straightforward. Two military alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact), each backed by its superpower ally, armed with nuclear missiles, and manned with hundreds of thousands of troops, faced each other across the center of Germany. But when the Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to the unification of Germany and then collapsed, the geopolitical situation changed dramatically.4° Now the East European countries faced neither an aggressive Germany nor a powerful Soviet Union. But memories are long. On one hand all feared the possibility of a resurgent Russia, and on the other, given the history of appeasement in 1938 and the failure to aid Hungary in 1956, many did not trust the West to come to their aid in time of need. Something had to be done. At first, some hoped that an entirely new architecture might be constructed along the lines of Gorbachev's “common European home.” Then others thought that maybe the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which grew out of the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and was designed to engage human rights, might provide a template for a security framework. But the OSCE has no military arm. Another possibility

seemed to be putting together an East European alliance system. This led to a number of integrative projects, such as the Central European Initiative, the Visegrad Group, the Central European Free Trade Area, and the South European Cooperation Initiative. These organizations still exist and continue to play a role in creating linkages among the post-Communist states. But none of them solved the military issue. The key question was what would the United States do? Would it even remain in Europe, now that the Soviet Union was gone? Or, put another way, what would happen to NATO? By the end of 1991 the original Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) publicly stated they would like to join NATO, which they saw as an easier way of proving that they were returning to democratic Europe than jumping immediately into the European Union.’ At first the United States had little interest in expanding the alliance, both because it might destabilize Russia and because it would complicate NATO's strategic planning. Indeed, whereas it is easy to see why the East European countries might want to slip under the security umbrella of the United States and NATO, it is not so clear why NATO would want to include the East European countries. Expansion would increase the alliance’s responsibilities and its costs without commensurate increases in its effectiveness. As one American general put it in 1993, “I don't want these God damn countries in my alliance.”48 Nevertheless, by the time the general was making his unfortunate remark the debate that had begun in 1989 about NATO's role in Europe’s new geopolitical circumstances was bearing fruit. In September 1995 NATO announced that it was no longer a question of whether

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 289

the alliance would accept new members, but what the modalities of accession would be.*9 This change in position, especially in the United States, came not for strategic or material reasons, but because leaders, especially U.S. President Bill Clinton, came to accept the arguments of people like Havel and Watesa that the West had a duty to bring its values of democracy and transparency to the East.5° The alliance’s “Study on NATO Enlargement” made it clear that NATO was interested not only in increased stability and security, but also in shared democratic values, habits of cooperation, and good neighborly relations. This ambi-

tion was not simply window dressing. For example, paragraph 6 of the study explicitly stated that “states which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes... must settle those disputes by peaceful means.”5! The country this applied

to specifically was Hungary. Under pressure to conform, and against strong opposition from nationalist parties, the new socialist government of 1994 worked out treaties of friendship with Slovakia and Romania that renounced revisionist claims for the Hungarian minorities in those countries. In Poland too NATO's leverage had a major impact.52 NATO insisted that ultimate authority over the military must be in civilian hands and that parliament should pass military bud-

gets by transparent means. This did not prove a major problem in the Czech Republic or in Hungary, but when Lech Walesa was president in Poland, the Polish General Staff managed to maintain considerable independence from civilian oversight.53 His opponents, however, saw the democratizing rules of NATO as the “civilization standard” when it came to military security, and in 1995 they pushed through a law placing the General Staff under the civilian Minister of Defense. Finally, in 1997, after strong pressure from the United States, President Kwasniewski, who replaced Walesa in 1995, fired the chief of the General Staff who had for many years found ways to hinder Poland’s integration into NATO. A few weeks later a NATO summit in Madrid extended its invitation to the three central European countries, and by 1999 they became full fledged members of the Atlantic alliance. In 2004, in a second wave of expansion, the Baltic states, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia, joined them.

Entry into NATO probably did not have a significant effect on the security of any of the post-Communist states, none of which face a plausible military threat. But the process of achieving membership, which included scores of conferences, training sessions, public discussions, and political deals, helped to consolidate pluralistic norms of international behavior in the new Eastern Europe. But joining NATO was not the main prize. Joining the European Union remained the primary goal of all Central European post-Communist states, with the exception of Vladimir Meciar’s Slovakia. But the members of the European Union remained dubious. They focused their attention first on the unification of Germany and then on creating the EU, which came into being only in November 1993.54 Then the entire new three-pillar structure had to face up to its failure to deal adequately with the Wars of Yugoslav Succession and with the negotiations with the European Free Trade Association that led to the entry of Austria, Sweden, and Finland into the union in 1995. These distractions did not mean that

290 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the European powers ignored the post-Communist states. On the contrary: Even before the fall of the wall discussions had begun and in 1989 a program to provide technical assistance to Poland and Hungary was already in place. Eventually the EU extended PHARE, as this program was called (Poland/Hungary: Assistance for Restructuring Economies) to all aspiring post-Communist countries, where it played an important role in providing professional assistance in adopting west European standards. Other programs for assistance included aid programs set up by the Organization for Cooperation and Development, lending commitments from the European Investment Bank, and the creation of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.* These programs were useful in their way, but none of them promised to lead toward inclusion inside the EU’s tent; indeed, quite the opposite. Helpful though they were, they were seen as individual expedients, not as steps on a path toward membership. Nevertheless, early in 1990 negotiations between the community and the Visegrad countries for the completion of “Europe Agreements” began. In principle EU leaders claimed that the underlying basis for the negotiations would be “support and encouragement for the establishment of free, open, and democratic societies in which the full enjoyment of human rights is guaranteed by the rule of law.” In actuality, it turned out that the EU’s main goal at this early stage seemed to be taking advantage of the weakness of the new democracies to benefit the Western powers own special interests.56 The community sought free entry into the Visegrad countries for its services, but tried to limit the export of goods from those countries to the west. One of the most piquant examples of this kind of behavior was the French veto of letting 1,400 tons of lamb and beef into the EU because of objections from French farmers, despite the absurdly small amount involved in comparison to the EU's seven million ton annual meat market.5” The agreements were eventually signed by the end of 1991, but with many loopholes

that permitted EU members to hinder or even ban imports from a country, or even the entire region, for a variety of reasons. By 1993 such “protective devices” covered between 40 and 50 percent of trade between the two regions.58 The member countries also procrastinated, so that even these agreements did not go into effect fully until February 1994 for Poland and Hungary, and February 1995 for the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Unfortunately for the Visegrad countries they had little choice in the matter. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which was the weak Communist analogue to the European Community, collapsed by 1991; trade with the declining Soviet Union cratered; and what trade that did exist to the east suddenly had to be conducted in convertible currency. The East European countries simply had to reorient their trade to the west if they were going have any hope of resolving

their sharp downturn. But the negotiations taught them two things. First, they were not going to get any trade concessions from the much more powerful West merely because they had virtuously thrown off communism; and second, even as their early admiration for the EU plunged, they realized that there was absolutely no alternative to membership. Remaining outside would mean abdicating any

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 291

say in their own future. On their side, EU members began to realize by mid-1993 that focusing on internal reforms and leaving the post-Communist countries out of the community (deepening it, as the French wanted) would probably be more destabilizing in the long run than expanding it into a fuller definition of Europe

(broadening it, as the Germans sought). Therefore, in June 1993 a European Council held in Copenhagen laid out what became known as the Copenhagen criteria for admission to the EU. These called for aspirants to have a stable democracy governed by the rule of law and respect for human rights as well as the rights of minorities and to have a functioning market economy capable of coping with the demands of membership. The important thing was not these criteria, which were both vague and obvious, but the decision by the EU that given an appropriate response by the applicants it was now open to bringing them on board. From now on the East European countries had a clear objective in sight.

By mid-June 1996 ten states had made formal application for membership: the six countries I have been calling Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and Slovenia (by this time Cyprus and Malta were also candidates). In December 1997 the European Council officially invited Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia (along with Estonia and Cyprus) to open negotiations for membership, and two years later it extended the invitation to post-Meciar Slovakia and five others. The term “negotiations” needs to be taken with a grain of salt, however. Becoming a member did not mean simply installing a democratic political system and a market economy. It required a far reaching revamping of each country's legislation and practice in many areas, especially regarding minority rights. Each applicant would have to adopt the entire range of community legislation in all fields, including statistics, fisheries, company law, the environment, cultural and audio-visual policies, science, and many others. These acquis communautaire, as they are called, were broken down into bundles of laws, rules, and regulations comprising 31 chapters (at that time), each of which had to be not just adopted by parliament but administratively implemented as well. The EU Commission had the responsibility of monitoring the process and screening all of the laws of every applicant country to make sure that they were consistent with all of the 31 acquis. Each country had to produce a detailed “National Program for the Adoption of the Acquis,” a substantial document that required commitment and expertise not always immediately available. Each applicant reported in writing how and when it would adopt a particular chapter of the acquis and received a response that had to be unanimously agreed to by all fifteen members of the EU. Many problems ensued, not least of which was getting unanimity from the Member States. The technical issues were formidable. For example, all the relevant laws had to be translated into English, which was not only a huge effort, but often led to misunderstandings because of the lack of standardized terms. Bilateral negotiations between the Commission and every candidate country for each of the 31 chapters of the acquis went on until the Commission declared a chapter “closed.” The Commission also issued annual reports on how things were going in each country, giving Poland a deadline by

292 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

which to restructure its steel industry, for example, or admonishing Hungary that it had to reform its health system. Some difficult issues proved amenable to compromise. For example, member countries were worried about a sudden influx of poor East Europeans seeking work, whereas the East Europeans did not want to permit rich Westerners to be able to buy land in their countries until the economies were on a more even level. The compromise was to create a phase-in period of up to seven years before the full EU rules on movement of peoples and purchases of land would be implemented. The EU worried that full adoption of all the rules surrounding agriculture would bankrupt the Common Agricultural Policy because of the high number of inefficient farmers in Poland and elsewhere. Thus Poland and others had to agree to putting off full participation in the community’s agricultural subsidy program until 2013. Those were big issues, but thousands of agreements had to be pinned down. Here is an example of the mind-bending complexity that even minor agreements reached: Hungary was allowed to postpone the application of the overall minimum excise duty on the retail selling prices (inclusive of all taxes) for cigarettes of the price

category most in demand until 31 December 2008, provided that during the period Hungary gradually adjusted its excise duty rates toward the overall minimum excise duty. In parallel to that, Member States may, as long as the above derogation applies, maintain the same quantitative limits for cigarettes which may be brought into their territories from Hungary without further excise duty payment as those applied to imports from third countries. Member states making use of the right may carry out the necessary customs controls provided that they do not affect the proper functioning of the internal market.

The astonishing thing is that these formal, tedious, controversial, and time consuming negotiations over thousands of arcane issues came to a successful conclusion. In 2002, the EU deemed negotiations with the initial set of applicants to have successfully concluded. The decision came in part not because every issue was settled, but because the discussions in many venues had set up a certain momentum that several members wanted to make sure would not dissipate in desultory discussions. Even then the process was not over. After the agreements had been put in the form of treaties, each of the fifteen member countries had to approve, which they did, and each of the ten incoming members had to get public approval by means of a referendum.* Think for a moment how improbable this was—nine applicant countries had to hold referendums (Cyprus did not) to approve highly technical arrangements by which their country adopted about 80,000 pages of sometimes controversial foreign laws. Then the parliaments of fifteen current EU governments each had to accept countries into their midst that twenty years earlier they had considered enemies. And yet it happened. On May 1, 2004, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltic Republics, along with Malta and Cyprus, became full fledged members of the European Union, having completed in only fifteen years their improbable journey from “real existing socialism” to membership in democratic, marketoriented Europe.

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 293

LIFE GOES ON A good deal of the political energy in East Central Europe during the accession years was taken up by working out the details of joining the European Union. Despite the pattern of alternating governments that in due course characterized all the Visegrad countries, the goal of returning to Europe was broadly accepted by elites and citizens alike. The accession process kept all but the extremist parties focused on that task. In many ways, the EU was in a position to impose its rules and regulations, but always within the limitations of local customs and usage. One area that illustrates both the EU’s powerful leverage and its limitations concerned the rights afforded to women.*? Communist regimes brought most able bodied women into the workforce. To make this entry into the working class possible, they provided job security, child care (not always adequate), family subsidies, and maternity leaves. On the other hand, women without the credentials afforded by higher education tended to be employed in the lower third of the economy, women’s path to promotion was difficult, and women’s wages were generally lower than men’s wages. When communism collapsed, and in Hungary even before, maintenance of the social safety net began to decline and attitudes began to shift. The double burden of work and home (sometimes a triple burden when a woman worked in the second economy as well) had always cut two ways. Some women, especially well trained ones, found a sense of worth in putting their talents into remunerative work, while others resented the fact that they were forced to work instead of being able to concentrate on their homes and families. This latter point of view often made women hostile to Western style feminism when it began to penetrate Eastern Europe after the collapse because they associated the Western interest in equal rights with the similar rhetoric of the communists, which they resented.® Still other women found they had no choice because they had to work for their families to survive. Early in the transition it was feared that the economic downturn would differentially affect women, but Christy M. Glass has shown that this did not occur immediately.*4 Many jobs were lost, some for good, but men and women were more or less equally affected. But as economies began to improve, and as governments began to cut back on the expensive safety net for mothers, transferring some of those responsibilities to the private sector, employers’ reluctance to hire women with children, or even likely to have children, increased. This effect was especially marked in Poland, where the strong influence of the Catholic Church strengthened attitudes favoring women’s place in the home rather than at work. The insistence of the European Union after 1998 that its rules on equal pay, equal treatment, nondiscrimination in pensions, and standardized parental leave be adopted as part of the acquis had little impact on this change. East European countries that had not moved aggressively in the area of women’s right were forced to adopt this part of the acquis by 2002, without controversy in the Czech Republic, for example, and with considerable controversy in Poland. Still, in 2002 Poland grudgingly adopted the EU rules on women’s rights because it concluded

294. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

that entry into the EU was more important than not complying. However both in Poland and elsewhere, these rights are observed more in the breach, so that the leverage the EU imposed in this area was more formal than real. The long-term impact of the legal changes adopted throughout the region in 2001 and 2002 will probably depend more on the development of civil society, that is the mobilization of women’s organizations, than on the mere fact of a legal structure that has been refashioned to meet European standards.°© Abortion is often considered an issue of human rights, for the woman in the case of pro-choice advocates, and for the fetus in the case of pro-life believers. But many feminists considered it not so much a right in itself, but a part of the right to privacy, the right for a woman to choose how to deal with her own body. As Susan Gal has shown in the case of Hungary, the abortion debate in Eastern Europe was not primarily a question of human rights but rather a surrogate for ideological efforts to define the public space, often using arguments that had a lengthy history. Populists wanted to define the state as “built on a moral con-

sensus, one that represents a national/ethnic unity” and therefore possessing the right to prohibit abortion to preserve the moral compass and demographic health of the nation. More secular groups pursued the privacy argument, making “a sharp divide between the public...and the private,” with the state acting as a neutral arbiter and the private sphere encompassing moral judgments such as those surrounding abortion.°’ In most East European countries, including even heavily Catholic Slovenia, introducing or keeping abortion rights has not been more than a normally contentious issue, leaving the secular version of abortion rights as primarily a private affair in place. In Poland, however, despite the emergence of a significant number of advocacy groups seeking to maintain the permissive rules on abortion left over from the Communist era, in 1993 the Solidarity government, backed and encouraged by the Catholic Church, forbade most abortions. Poland still maintains the most restrictive rules on abortion in Europe.* Women’s role in the workforce is an issue that affects a significant propor-

tion of the population, both male and female, but two policy areas that affect everyone sooner or later are pensions and taxes. Whereas in many spheres East European countries adopted European laws and standards, in the case of pension and tax reform they were innovators. Two schemes that have proven to be non-starters in the United States have been widely adopted in post-1989 Eastern Europe: privatized national pension plans and the flat tax. The former Communist countries made provisions for old age simply by paying set pensions to retirees out of the state budget, a pay-as-you-go, defined benefit system.°? The state collected contributions—taxes—from employers and employees and immediately disbursed them to retired people at a rate set by law. After the collapse, when the entire structure of the economy changed, this system became increasingly unsupportable. In Poland, for example, each pensioner is supported by four workers. But if current demographic trends continue, by 2050 only about one and one-half worker will be available to support each pensioner.” This situation is not

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 295

unique to Eastern Europe. Declining birth rates and lengthening life spans are putting pressure on retirement systems worldwide. Some problems were specific to Eastern Europe, however. For example, to deal with the problem of a sudden increase in unemployment in the economic collapse that followed 1989, some countries lowered the retirement age to encourage older workers to retire and open up slots for younger persons, greatly increasing the cost of their programs. In the 1990s the efficiency of tax collection systems was also low, reducing the resources available to pay pensions. And there came a point at which raising payroll taxes, which in the case of Hungary reached 62 percent in 2003, was no longer feasible.7!

During the 1990s, therefore, every East European state had to start thinking about how to fulfill an onerous but universally accepted obligation to provide pensions to retired persons.” Into this difficult situation stepped the World Bank. In 1994, it published an important study entitled Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth.?3 Influenced by the concepts in this study, and encouraged by the World Bank and other transnational organizations such as the IMF and USAID, at least twenty-six countries reformed

their pension systems in line with this “new pension orthodoxy.’” In Eastern Europe these included Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Kosova, Serbia, and Croatia. Slovenia specifically declined to do so. What does privatization mean in practice? The World Bank report of 1994 suggested a three-pillar system. The first pillar consists of a traditional pay-as-

you-go defined benefit plan, similar to the old social security systems, but at a much lower level. The purpose of this first pillar to secure a base income to alleviate the worst levels of poverty. The second pillar is a defined contribution scheme

in which the ongoing contributions of each taxpayer are placed in a personal account administered by highly regulated investment firms. When the individual retires, he or she typically receives either the lump sum that has accumulated in the fund or an annuity purchased from a regulated insurance company based on that accumulation. The third pillar consists of a defined contribution scheme in which contributions are made to private investment firms, perhaps created by the employer. All three pillars would be in addition to any personal investments an individual might make. Transnational actors had an enormous influence on the acceptance of the World Bank's plan in Eastern Europe, but at the same time the outcomes in each country have been the result of an interplay of unique forces within each political environment. In Poland, for example, essentially all the political parties, as well as union representatives and others, in one way or another under two different governments participated

in the widely publicized debates that led to final adoption, which used the effective slogan “Security through Diversity.’75 In Hungary, the World Bank continued to play a significant role throughout the entire reform process.” In contrast to Poland, however, the debates among the main players in Hungary were characteristically an elite affair among the two main political parties, the trade unions, the existing pension fund managers, and the government’s working group on pension reform.77

296 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

A second neoliberal idea is alive and well in Eastern Europe today, namely, the flat tax. 78 States always collect taxes. The value added tax (VAT) is especially popular in Europe. This is a type of sales tax that taxes the value added to a product at each stage of its production. Every country also has an often bewildering variety of other taxes as well, such as excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol, tariffs, property taxes, and taxes to pay for social services like unemployment insurance, medical care, and pension plans. The term “flat tax” normally refers only to the tax on income, personal or corporate, although the rates, exact provisions, and constant adjustments make each country something of a special case.79 In the United States this idea has gone nowhere, at least so far. But it has had resonance in Eastern Europe, not as much as privatizing pensions perhaps, but some form of flat tax has been adopted by thirteen post-Communist states, including Russia. As of 2010, in Central Europe only Slovakia had adopted a flat tax, charging 19 percent on personal and corporate income, as well as using the same rate for the VAT. But in Southeast Europe Serbia, Romania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, and Bulgaria have adopted the scheme with varying rates.

Not even the fairest and most rational system of taxation can substitute for the main engine of state solvency, a vigorous economy. It was clear immediately after the collapse of communism that economic stability would not be achieved overnight and that a significant period of perhaps disastrous decline would occur. And this is in fact what happened. In East Central Europe between 1989 and 1993 GDP dropped from 15 to 25 percent.8° By the mid-1990s, however,

the worst was over and most economies began to grow. From 1997 to 2008 the GDP of every East Central European economy at least doubled, and Slovakia’s almost tripled. This did not bring these economies much better than two-thirds of the way toward parity with the rest of the EU in terms of per capita income, although the Czech Republic and Slovenia passed Portugal. Nevertheless, until the world economic downturn of 2008, personal income in all Central European countries rose significantly. GDP is a meaningful figure, but it hides a number of anomalies. For example, while the average income has increased, the equality of incomes across the population, which was a feature of the Communist economies, has declined. Entrepreneurs and skilled workers have prospered, as have the well connected, but less educated and rural populations have not participated in the growing economies as successfully. Unemployment did not exist under communism, but as firms began to become more efficient they began to shed employees and unemployment became a fact of life for the first time. The rates were usually not outrageous by European standards, which are higher than in the United States, but they did bring the costs of the transition home to many people.

The economic downturn in the first few years after 1989 led many analysts to worry about Eastern Europe's future. Would the new economic realities lead to social unrest and the outbreak of resistance to democratization, even violence? Could one introduce difficult economic reforms when democracy permitted the public to make its views known and encouraged parties to squabble over what to

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 297

do? Surprisingly, the short-term losers in the economic transition did not abandon their willingness to endorse democracy. There were no outbreaks of violence or military coups. By 2005, as Andrew Roberts has shown, East European countries were as democratic as those claiming to be democratic elsewhere.*! Indeed, it was the winners who tended to stand in the way of reform, not the losers. The most egregious example was the cronies of Vladimir Meciar, who did everything they could to retain the right to continue their rent seeking and prevent democratic or marketizing reforms.®? Still, once Meciar fell, Slovakia moved forward with surprising rapidity. Another fear of early analysts was the possibility of a revival of xenophobic nationalism, even fascism.’3 As long as the East European countries were seeking entry into the European Union, those tendencies were kept in check. Neofascist parties have blossomed with the decline of the EU’s leverage and with the economic downturn of 2008. Nevertheless, despite some ugly incidents, one of the main characteristics of fascism, anti-Semitism, has been on the decline in Eastern Europe in comparison with its previous history. Poland is experiencing a substantial revival of interest in Jewish studies. Konstanty Gebert, a Polish journalist, says that “the country has undergone a serious moral transformation in the wake of the Jedwabne debate, [which was] stunningly profound and stunningly courageous. 8 Among other things, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which plans to open in 2012, has launched its “virtual Shtetl” Web site. This open source project identifies almost 1,000 former Jewish settlements and solicits viewers to add information they may have, including photographs, letters, or other memorabilia about any shtetl that might interest them. As Jerzy Halbersztadt, director of the museum, puts it, “Anti-Semitism is no longer an issue particular to us in daily life.”85 In Hungary, The Economist noted in 2009 that “anti-semitism is not part of the political dialogue” any more.®*¢ It is not likely

that anti-Semitism as a personal viewpoint will entirely disappear from Eastern Europe, as it has not disappeared in Western Europe, but the situation today is as different as night and day from that of the 1930s.

One intractable social problem characteristic of Eastern Europe is the position of gypsies, or as they are called more formally, Roma.87 Something like four million Roma live in Eastern Europe, and they remain at the very bottom of the social hierarchy in every country, even often in the West as well.88 Despite the efforts of a handful of dedicated Roma activists, it has been difficult to integrate Roma into the general population, despite the fact that many Roma make an effort to do so by marriage or by “passing.” The term “Roma” itself has been adopted by scholars and humanitarians to give the disparate groups falling under it an identity fitting the ethnic definition of peoples and states that is the norm in modern Europe. But the collective term covers many peoples and tribes who do not speak the same language, who do not share the same customs, and who have neither a specific homeland nor territorial demands. Indeed, the various political parties that have emerged representing Roma have had difficulty coming up with programs that would attract Roma voters, who

298 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

are interested primarily in economic issues.8? Without the mobilizing force of nationalism, it has been very difficult for the Roma to impact the political culture that despises them. Communist governments tried, sometimes quite forcefully, to integrate the hitherto nomadic Roma and to raise their educational level. These efforts,

often taken without much input from the Roma themselves, were moderately successful so that today most Roma in East Central Europe are no longer nomadic, although the settlements they live in usually are separate from the rest of the community. Usually undereducated and employed in unskilled labor, the Roma were perhaps the social group that lost the most in the transition from communism. They were not only the first to be laid off, but also the least able to take advantage of the declining social safety net. Responding to pressure from the EU and international NGOs, most East European coun-

tries have taken formal steps to identify and assist their Roma minority. Nevertheless, Roma have had enormous difficulty in transitioning to the new situation. Often living in makeshift housing on land they do not own, without running water, links to municipal sewer systems, or any of the other normal public services like postal service or garbage collection, millions of East European Roma remain on the outside of whatever progress the new democracies have made since 1989. Balancing some of these problems is a less obvious positive factor in postCommunist Eastern Europe: the lessening of the weaknesses inherent in smallness. Two limits faced by small countries are their perceived powerlessness in the

international arena and the lack of opportunity for their ablest and most ambitious citizens. The first is not entirely overcome by membership in the EU, but by being part of the union each country obtains its fair share of power to influence community decisions without giving up its fundamental sovereignty. Instead of being a tiny country of 2 million people, Slovenia, for example, is now a full partner of a functioning whole of some 450 million. Membership also has completely

transformed the vistas open to the most capable members of each society. In a self-contained and parochial Hungary, for example, the final stop for the best and the brightest was perforce Budapest. Integration into the European Union has opened hundreds, even thousands of places where ambitious Hungarians can seek their fortunes, and not only in business or the professions. For persons interested in politics the bureaucracies of the many international entities and non-government organizations provide an almost endlessly fertile field for meaningful careers. The danger of this widening opportunity is that if too many ambitious and educated persons, especially young ones, leave the country, while the least educated and least ambitious stay at home, a situation is created that may

enhance radical politics. Part of the explanation for the growth in the popularity of the extreme right in the region after the completion of accession may lie in this factor. But in the long run, the opening of these small countries to participation in the larger whole may well be the most invigorating change the region has experienced.

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 299

NOTES 1. John Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, accessed April 1, 2010, http://www.petersoninstitute. org/publications/papers/print.cfm?researchid=486&doc=pub 2. John Williamson, “What Should the World Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?” Peterson Institute for International Economics, accessed April 1, 2010, http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/print.cfm?researchid=351&doc=pub; Moises Naim, “Washington Consensus or Washington Confusion?,” Foreign Policy 118 (Spring 2000): 87-103.

3. Neoliberal is an international term. In the United States the same collection of ideas are usually called neo-conservative. Paul Treanor provides this definition of neoliberalism: “Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services, and without any attempt to justify them in terms of their effect on the production of goods and services; and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs,” accessed March 10, 2009, http://web.inter.nl.net/users/PaulTreanor/neoliberalism.html 4. As Mark Kramer points out, fear that the magnitude of the changes would produce discontent, even perhaps violence, was actually the prevalent view. See his “Social Protection Policies and Safety Nets in East-Central Europe: Dilemmas of the Post communist Transformation,” in Sustaining the Transition : The Social Safety Net in Postcommunist Europe, ed. Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mandelbaum (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997), 107-108 (fn. 1). 5. Jeffrey Sachs, Poland’s Jump to the Market Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 40.

6. Leszek Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation (Budapest, Hungary: Central European Press, 1995), 57. For Balcerowicz’s description of the Polish reforms see chapters 15 and 16, pp. 290-339.

7. David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). 8. New York Times, November 23, 1990, op-ed page.

9. For rich details on post-Communist elections in Poland see Frances Millard, Democratic Elections in Poland, 1991-2007 (London: Routledge, 2010).

10. On the post-Communist role of Communist parties, see Anna Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

11. Andrew Harrison Schwartz, The Politics of Greed: How Privatization Structured Politics in Central and Eastern Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), 300.

12. Mitchell A. Orenstein, Out of the Red: Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 111, 112. 13. Ryszard Rapacki, “Economic Performance 1989-1999 and Prospects for the Future,”

in Poland into the New Millennium, ed. George Blazyca and Ryszard Rapacki (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgard, 2001), 109. 14. Elizabeth C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 6.

300 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 15. Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001). See the map preceding page 1. 16. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), especially chapters 12 and 13. 17. The new president, Arpad Géncz, may have been a Free Democrat, but he was also an old friend of Antall.

18. Laszl6 Valki, “Hungary: Understanding Western Messages,’ in Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe, Volume 2: International and Transnational Factors,

ed. Jan Zielonka and Alex Pravda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 296. Viktor Orban, whose right wing FIDESz party convincingly won the election of 2010, has gone back to talking about 15 million Hungarians. 19. Ibid., 303. 20. Note that Antall himself died of cancer in December 1993. 21. Csilla Kiss, “From Liberalism to Conservatism: The Federation of Young Democrats in Post-Communist Hungary,” East European Politics and Societies 16, no. 3 (2003): 739-763. See Gergely Egedy, “Political Conservatism in Post-Communist Hungary,” Problems of Post-Communism 56, no. 3 (May/June, 2009): 42-53, for a good discussion of Orban’s evolution.

22. Béla Kiraly, “Soft Dictatorship, Lawful Revolution, and the Socialists’ Return to Power,” in Lawful Revolution in Hungary, ed. Béla Kiraly (Highland Lakes, N.J.: Atlantic Research, 1995), 10.

23. Andrew Harrison Schwartz gives an example of the low level of economic understanding in the Czech Republic. He writes that “as late as 1993, only two of the countrys top twenty-five business and finance students [whom he was teaching in the country’s best business school] knew the difference between debt and equity” (The Politics of Greed, 94 and 123, fn. 19).

24. Keith Crane, “Privatization Policies,’ in Dilemmas of Transition: The Hungarian Experience ed. Aurel Braun and Zoltan Barany (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), 203-223. 25. FIDESz lost the next election in 2002 to the socialists, who stayed in office until 2010, when FIDESz scored a huge electoral victory that returned Orban to power. 26. Mary Heimann has this to say about the postwar Benes regime: “The Third Republic, so often portrayed as a time of national liberation and democratic revival..., was in reality a brutal and brutalizing time, one whose ruthlessness was driven as much by resurgent Czech nationalism as by specifically Communist ambition” (Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009], 151). 27. Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 19141948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 219.

28. For a succinct narrative, see Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Pittsburgh University Press, 2004), 39-70. For a detailed analysis, see Schwartz, The Politics of Greed. Note that voucher programs of various kinds were put in place throughout the region, but Klaus’s plan was the most thoroughgoing and had the biggest impact. 29. Transition: The Newsletter about Reforming Economies 3, no. 1 (January 1992): 10.

30. Nadya Nedelsky, “Czechoslovakia and the Czech and Slovak Republics,” in Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoning with the Communist Past, ed. Lavinia Stan (London: Routledge, 2009), 37-75.

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 301

31. The term “Czech lands” refers to the three constituent parts of the Czech Republic: Bohemia, Moravia, and the Czech portion of Silesia. 32. Abby Innes, Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). 33. M. Steven Fish, “A Vladimir Meciar (sic) Retrospective: The End of Meciarism (sic),”

East European Constitutional Review 8, no. 1-2 (Winter/Spring 1999), accessed May 5, 2010, http://wwwl.law.nyu.edu/eecr/vol8num 1-2/special/endofmec.html. For a more balanced analysis of Meciar’s regime, see Tim Haughton, Constraints and Opportunities of Leadership in Post-Communist Europe (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005). 34. Nadya Nedelsky, Defining the Sovereign Community: The Czech and Slovak Republics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 195-196.

35. Fish, “A Vladimir Meciar Retrospective.” For a good litany of Meciar’s actions, see Kevin Deegan-Krause, Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 23-60. See too Theodor Tudoroiu, Peter Horvath, and Marek HruSovsky, “UltraNationalism and Geopolitical Exceptionalism in Meciar’s Slovakia,’ Problems of Post-Communism 56, no. 4 (July/August 2009), 3-14. 36. For an excellent analysis of the difficult but positive role of the Slovak constitutional court, and indeed the constitutional courts of all the post-Communist states, see Herman Schwartz, The Struggle for Constitutional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Tom G. Palmer, introducing a collection of Klaus’ articles published by the Cato Institute in 1997, was typical: “Vaclav Klaus is, without a doubt, the most successful leader of a postcommunist nation in Europe. His leadership and vision have transformed what was among the most Stalinist states of the Warsaw bloc into the most bustling, vibrant, and open society in the region, in some ways surpassing even the long-established Western democracies neighboring it” (Vaclav Klaus, Renaissance: The Rebirth of Liberty in the Heart of Europe |Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute, 1997], xi).

39. Schwartz identifies fifteen commonly used methods of “tunneling,” as the Czechs called asset stripping (The Politics of Greed, 242). 40. Orenstein, Out of the Red, 107.

41. The following relies on Thomas Sacher, “German Efficiency Married to Czech Ingenuity,” Transitions Online, 23 February 2011, accessed February 25, 2011, http://

www.tol.org/client/article/22197-german-efficiency-married-to-czech-ingenity. html.

42. Mitchell Orenstein, “A Retrospective: Vaclav Klaus: Revolutionary and Parliamentarian,’ East European Constitutional Review, 7, no. 1 (Winter 1998), accessed May 5, 2010, http://wwwl.law.nyu.edu/eecr/Vol7num1/special/vaclavklaus. html]

43. Hilary Appel, “Corruption and the Collapse of the Czech Transition Miracle,” East European Politics and Society 15, no. 3 (2002): 528-553. 44. See Grzymata-Busse, Rebuilding Leviathan. 45. Rudolf Martin Rizman, Uncertain Path: Democratic Transition and Consolidation in Slovenia (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2006), 111. 46. One of the great symbolic moments of communism’s collapse came in Prague on July 1, 1991, when Vaclav Havel served as the host of the last meeting of the Warsaw Pact

302 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN and had the duty, as president of Czechoslovakia, and the pleasure, as a former dissident, to announce the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. 47. Fora detailed history of NATO engagement with the Visegrad countries, see the several works of Jeffrey Simon, such as Poland and NATO: A Study in Civil-Military Relations (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004). Zoltan Barany provides a brief overview of Hungary's situation in “Hungary: An Outpost on the Troubled Periphery,” in America’s New Allies: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in NATO ed. Andrew Michta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). Michta’s several books on the Polish military are essential reading for that country. 48. The comment is by General Barry McCaffrey, head of strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Ronald D. Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 33).

49. For arguments for and against NATO expansion, see Adam Garfinkle, “NATO Enlargement,” National Interest 46 (Winter 96/97): 102-111. In my experience, essentially all American scholars involved in some way in East European studies favored expansion, while essentially all scholars involved in aspects of Soviet or Russian studies opposed it. 50. Frank Schimmelfennig, The EU, NATO and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 51. NATO, Study on NATO Enlargement, September 3, 1995, accessed May 19, 2010, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_24733.htm 52. For the following, see Rachel A. Epstein, “NATO Enlargement and the Spread of

Democracy: Experience and Expectations,’ Security Studies 14, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2005): 63-105. 53. Vaclav Havel, for example, was a “great advocate of expansion,’ as he put it. “I felt that

the expansion of NATO to the East would guarantee the irreversibility of the new conditions in these countries, and of peace in Europe” (Vaclav Havel, To the Castle and Back [New York: Vintage Books, 2008], 296).

54. One of the major glitches in putting the Maastricht Agreement into effect was the effort needed to overcome the “no” vote in the Danish referendum of June 1992. 55. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), established in 1961, grew out of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation founded in 1947 to administer the Marshall Plan. It provided aid to Eastern Europe in the 1990s through what was called G-24, which consisted of its members plus Turkey. Today OECD has thirty-one members. The European Investment Bank, founded in 1958, is the long-term lending bank of the European Union. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was founded in 1991 to provide funding for banks, industries, and businesses in post-Communist countries. It stopped funding Baltic and Central European developmental projects in 2010. 56. Comment in January 1990 by the incoming Council president, quoted by Karen Elizabeth Smith, The Making of EU Foreign Policy: The Case of Eastern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1999), 92.

57. Josef C. Brada, “The European Community and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland,” Report on Eastern Europe, December 6, 1991: 28.

58. Milada Anna Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, & Integration after Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 88. Much of the following is based on Vachudova’s excellent study.

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 303 59. These criteria were for entrance only. Until the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, they were not required for countries that were already members. 60. George Vassiliou, ed., The Accession Story: The EU from Fifteen to Twenty-Five Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 197. This book outlines the accession details for each of the ten countries that became members in 2004. 61. For the referendum results, see Heather Grabbe, The EU’s Transformative Power: Europeanization through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe (Basingstroke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 22. All approved. The votes everywhere except Malta were overwhelming. 62. For a detailed discussion of this issue in each country (except Slovakia) see Open

Society Institute, Monitoring the EU Accession Process: Equal Opportunities for Women and Men (Budapest, Hungary: Joint Program of the Network Women’s Program and the Open Society Foundation Romania, 2002). For discussions of gender in Eastern Europe, see the special issues of East European Politics and Society, ed. Katherine Verdery and Jézsef B6r6cz, 8, no. 1 (March 1994) and ed. Susan Gal, 20, no. 1 (February 2008). 63. On this point see Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women's Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993).

64. Christy M. Glass, “Gender and Work during Transition: Job Loss in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia,” East European Politics and Society 22, no. 4 (November 2008): 757-783.

65. Malgorzata Fuszara points out, for example, that in Poland between 1989 and 1994 “the number of nursery schools decreased by 59 percent [while] the number of kindergartens decreased by 25 per cent” (“New Gender Relations in Poland in the 1990s,” in Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, ed. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000], 260). 66. Leah Seppanen Anderson, “European Union Gender Regulations in the East: The Czech and Polish Accession Process,” East European Politics and Society 20, no. 1 (February 2006): 101-125.

67. Susan Gal, “Gender in the Post-Socialist Transition: The Abortion Debate in Hungary,’ East European Politics and Society 8, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 280.

68. The Center for Reproductive Rights classifies all East European countries except Poland among the world’s least restrictive in granting abortion rights (group 5 out of 5). It places Poland in group 2, permitting abortions only to preserve physical health or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal impairment. 69. Walter Conner discusses Soviet style social laws, including pensions, in “Social Policy Under Communism,” in Sustaining the Transition, ed. Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mandelbaum, 10-45. 70. Agnieszka Chton-Dominczak, “The Polish Pension Reform of 1999,” in Elaine Fultz, Pension Reform in Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 1 (Budapest: International Labour Organization, 2002), 97. The population of Eastern Europe is projected to fall about 20 percent by 2050.

71. Anders Aslund, How Capitalism was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 201.

72. Oana I. Armeanu, “Experimenting with Financial Reform in Central and Eastern Europe: Political Parties, Coalitions, and Parties” (PhD dissertation, University of

304. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005), provides good background material. See also the excellent overview of Katharina Miller, “The Politics and Outcomes of Threepillar Pension Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Pension Reform in Europe? Politics Policies and Outcomes, ed. Camila Arza and Martin Kohli (Abington, England: Routledge, 2008), 87-106. 73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. The Bank evaluated the impact of its work on pension systems in Pension Reform and the Development of Pension Systems: An Evaluation of World Bank Assistance (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2006). 74. The first to privatize its pension system was Chile, and its experience has evoked substantial interest in Latin America and elsewhere. The Chilean plan has been fairly successful in covering persons with a stable long-term employment record, but has been less successful in dealing with issues such as poverty, gender equity, disability payments, and high administrative costs. Accordingly, Chile substantially revised the system in 2008 (Nicholas Barr and Peter Diamond, Reforming Pensions: Principles and Policy Choices [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008]).

75. Agnieszka Chion et al., “Shaping Pension Reform in Poland: Security Through Diversity,” Social Protection Discussion Paper Series, No. 9923, The World Bank, August 1999. 76. Mitchell A. Orenstein, Privatizing Pensions: The Transnational Campaign for Social Security Reform (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 102. 77. Unfortunately for advocates of privatizing pensions, the governments of both Poland and Hungary re-nationalized portions of their systems in 2011, claiming financial exigency.

78. The bible of flat-taxers is Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka, The Flat Tax, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2007). 79. Ina pure flat tax system, capital gains taxes would be levied only on business income, not personal income. Hall and Rabushka propose deducting the entire cost of an asset when it is purchased and taxing the entire proceeds when it is sold (111-112). 80. See the useful table in Jan Fidrmuc, “Economic Reform, Democracy and Growth during Post-Communist Transition,’ European Journal of Political Economy 19 (2003): 586.

81. Andrew Roberts, The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reforms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). In 2010 Freedom House gave all the East Central European countries its highest rating for both political rights and civil liberties. 82. See the seminal article by Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998), 203-234.

83. The following two paragraphs rely heavily on my articles “Thinking about 1989,” Problems of Post Communism, 56, no. 5 (September/October 2009): 15-17; and “1989 and the Return to History,” in The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (forthcoming).

84. Konstanty Gebert and Irina Maryniak, “Table Talk,” from www.europzine.com, September 30, 2009. Accessed October 1, 2009. “Jedwabne” refers to the controversy sparked by Jan Gross’s book Neighbors in which Gross described a moment when Poles in a small village massacred Jews early in World War II. 85. New York Times, April 9, 2009, “Poland Searches Its Own Soul,” article starting on p. Cl. An exception to the decline of anti-Semitism in Poland is the activity of Radio

CHAPTER 8 « Central Europe on the Move 305 Maryja, a Catholic-oriented radio station that opposed entry into the EU, is regularly in conflict with the Vatican, and often airs anti-Semitic messages. 86. January 30, 2009. 87. David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996); Dena Ringold, “Roma and the Transition in Central and Eastern Europe: Trends and Challenges,” (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2000). 88. I take this population figure from Zoltan Barany’s excellent book, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160. 89. As Aiden McGarry writes, “it is possible that ordinary Roma have no clear understanding of what Roma nationalism actually is.” See his “Ambiguous Nationalism?

Explaining the Parliamentary Under-Representation of Roma in Hungary and Romania, Romani Studies 19, no. 2 (2009): 110.

CHAPTER 9

a,

Southeastern Europe A Glass Half Empty

Goutbeasiere Europe, or the Balkans, as it is also known, has always played a subsidiary geopolitical role to wealthier, more powerful entities on its borders.

It was the marchlands of the Roman Empire, an important but not central part of the Orthodox or Byzantine commonwealth, a colonial region of the Ottoman Empire, and, in the era of nation states, a collection of small and poor cousins to the powerful industrial countries of Central and Western Europe. With the collapse of communism, therefore, the countries of the region faced a more fundamental problem of “returning to Europe” than did the countries of East Central Europe. Their difficulties were compounded by the collapse of Yugoslavia into its constituent parts and the warfare that ensued. Two Balkan countries, however, scored a signal success in the twenty years following 1989. Romania and Bulgaria, after many vicissitudes, became members of the European Union in 2007. This

did not mean that they had completely transformed themselves, but it did provide them with full membership in the comity of European states, opening up new opportunities for its citizens, and creating hope that a better future was a real possibility.

ROMANIA The Romanian revolution of December 1989, that is, the sudden collapse of the old regime and the execution of both Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, was actually not a very thoroughgoing revolution. The National Salvation Front (NSF) that imme-

diately proclaimed itself the interim government was made up of Communists who may have been in disfavor with the dictator but whose mentality was that of centralized authority and a state-dominated economy. After first proclaiming itself a nonpolitical formation, the NSF quickly changed into a political party and went on to thoroughly dominate the disorganized and inexperienced opposition for the first few years of the transition. Its leader, Ion Iliescu, became Romania's first president, an office he held until 1996 and then regained in 2000. As a young 306

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 307

man, Iliescu had risen as high as secretary of the Romanian Communist party's central committee, but in the 1970s he was demoted for questioning Ceausescu. He remained in the party, but in more obscure executive roles. Iliescu had a common touch and he lived a relatively modest lifestyle. But he was not tolerant of diverse opinions and sympathized with the most xenophobic and anti-Semitic political forces in his country. Nor was he averse to using a heavy hand. Three times in 1990 he mobilized an impromptu force of miners from the coal producing region of the Jiu valley to come to Bucharest and break up opposition demonstrations. The third of these violent outbursts caused six deaths and injured more than five hundred persons.! In 1991 the miners appeared a fourth time to successfully demand the resignation of Prime Minister Petre Roman, who was advocating a more rapid economic change and a more open political process than Iliescu was comfortable with. These mineriade, as they were called, shocked Western observers, who saw them as emanations of dark forces called up by a dictatorial regime to suppress potentially democratizing elements. There is little doubt that Iliescu and his Communist associates used the miners to solidify their power and that the participating miners did commit serious acts of violence. But the anthropologist David Kideckle has provided another side to the story.2 During communism, coal mining was not only a major industry, but coal miners were among the elite of the working class on which the regime was ostensibly built. The miners of the Jiu Valley considered themselves the cream of that crop. In 1977 they had staged one of only two successful strikes in Communist Romania. Ceausescu himself negotiated a settlement, but when shortly thereafter he flooded the region with new recruits from elsewhere and with secret service agents, traditional social networks among the miners began to fray. When the international socialist economy collapsed in 1990 and the demand for Romanian coal declined it became necessary to begin closing mines. In 1997, in what was conceived as a humane way to do this, miners were offered attractive buyouts. But the buyouts turned out to have unintended consequences. Almost none of the funds disbursed were used to start successful small businesses, for example, and within two years those who accepted the money began to run out of cash. After two widespread strikes, in January 1999 the leader of the miners union, Miron Cozma, organized a march of 15,000 frustrated miners who set off in the direction of Bucharest. Having thoroughly alarmed the government and even captured the police sent to stop them, they stopped halfway to the capitol, negotiated, and eventually returned to work. For his efforts the volatile Cozma spent eight years in prison, despite efforts by Iliescu to pardon him. The decade of the 1990s therefore was disastrous for the miners and their families. Instead of being an honored elite of the working class, miners became atomized individuals, many of whom no longer had jobs. Confronting uncertainty in their lives, they also faced a new set of consumer aspirations they found difficult to satisfy. Angry and powerless, many miners romanticized the good old days of communism, when their lives had meaning and stability, and often were drawn to anger-stoking political appeals which argued that their plight

308 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

was due to foreigners, especially Jews, who had allegedly stolen their former lives from them. The miners’ problems were not unique in Eastern Europe. But in Romania they were probably unavoidable, given the backwardness of the economy and the new demands being made on it by global forces. The largest social group in Romania, the peasantry, which in 1990 constituted just under 50 percent of the workforce, suffered too. The privatization of land in Romania occurred very rapidly after 1989. By the end of 1992 title to over 80 percent of the available land

had been given to several million Romanians, often in widely separated plots. But simply receiving land did not mean that the new owners were able to reap the

benefits of ownership. Most peasants were too poor to employ the appropriate insecticides, fertilizers, or tilling equipment that are required to turn land into efficient farms or to consolidate their scattered holdings. Only those who were already well connected through the networks they had established under communism, the old party managers, were able to accumulate the resources permitting them to introduce modern farming methods. Under pressure from these new entrepreneurs, land became a commodity, losing its traditional meaning as a measure of status, as a recognition of work and stability. This, of course, is just what neoliberal reformers had hoped for, the pushing of the older, less entrepreneurial peasant population aside by the more vigorous, economically rational elements. But as Katherine Verdery observes, “Only someone who had not suffered [this terribly costly solution] could dismiss it as just a normal response to supply and demand.” The undeveloped state of the Romanian banking system, coupled with a high rate of inflation that was eroding savings, led to another typical phenomenon of the transition economies, the blossoming of pyramid investing schemes. In Romania the most important of these was called Caritas.5 Based in Cluj under the protection of its xenophobic mayor Georghe Funar, in the summer of the 1993 Caritas became an obsession with Romanians. Thousands of eager investors traveled to Cluj to invest in this mysterious new capitalist venture that promised

to multiply their money eightfold in three months. Some early participants did well, but by the turn of 1994 Caritas was in trouble, and early that year it failed completely, along with dozens of other similar firms. The disillusion this occasioned was not as bad as one might think, in part because the creator of Caritas wound it down slowly, so that by the end unsuccessful investors were more or less resigned to their losses. Unlike a similar collapse in Albania three years later, no violent outbursts marked the end of the bubble. In fact, the experience may have helped Romanians to begin to think about money in a way more appropriate to market economies. But it was an unfortunate introduction to capitalism none the less. The fate of the miners, and the use they were put to, the disruption endured by millions of poor landowners, and the negative example of capitalism provided by the pyramid schemes ravaged a country already left destitute by Ceausescu.°¢ Part of the problem was that from the beginning Iliescu committed himself not simply to gradualism, but actually to maintaining the structures of the state

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 309

economy. He took this position not only because it permitted friends loyal to the regime, former members of the nomenklatura and of the Romanian secret police (securitate), to enrich themselves, but because centralized control was the mentality of those around him who were administering the state, almost all of whom had spent their formative years accepting the premises of state socialism. By mid1996 Romania was “the least marketized and least liberalized economy” in Eastern Europe.’ Politically, the country remained undeveloped as well, with parties that constantly changed their names and politicians who switched allegiances according to their personal advantage. Iliescu helped poison the political atmosphere for much of his time in office by playing the nationalist card and expressing support for right wing radicals like Georghe Funar and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the leader of the racist organization Romdnia Mare (Greater Romania). The primary target of the nationalist strategy was the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, whom these activists falsely accused of seeking to destroy Romania. Despite the almost complete lack of Jews in Romania by the1990s, Tudor in particular also used his party’s newspaper for viciously anti-Semitic attacks that would not be permitted in other European countries that have laws against sowing racial hatred (Romania had such a law, but it was not enforced). And yet, in one sphere, Romania made real progress: its elections were relatively fair. Indeed, the presidential election of 1996 was an important milestone. When a disenchanted public dumped Iliescu, even though he tried to dissociate himself from the extremists, he did not try to use extraordinary methods to stay in power, as Slobodan MiloSevic did in Serbia, but, in good democratic style, simply stepped down. The new president, academic Emil Constantinescu, chose the able reforming mayor of Bucharest, Victor Ciorbea, to head his government. The coalition Ciorbea led began to make all the right noises about reform, removing subsidies from fuel, electricity, public transportation, and telecommunications, and freeing up prices, but the main effect of these and similar reforms was simply to make life harder for most Romanians. Coalition partners spent much of their time squabbling, especially over questions of how and to what extent the by now unreliable files of the securitate should be opened.’ As a result, when Constantinescu’s term came to aclose in 2000 there was no chance that a dissatisfied public would reelect him. Naturally, Iliescu was a candidate again, but many were shocked and not a little concerned when in the first round of the election Corneliu Vadim Tudor obtained 28 percent of the vote to only 36 percent for Iliescu.2 Foreign observers were not great fans of Iliescu, but the possibility that such a radical xenophobe and anti-Semite as Tudor might become president of Romania mobilized both the Romanian electorate and foreign chancelleries. In the end, Iliescu took about

two-thirds of the vote in the final round, and Tudor’s party did not even pass the 5 percent threshold that would have gotten it into parliament. Iliescu and his party, the former National Salvation Front, soon to be renamed the Social Democratic party (Partidul Social Democrat) in an effort to scrub its image for European consumption, took over. Almost immediately he distributed all the significant public offices under his control to loyal supporters.

310 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

One would think that with its overall performance in both the economic and political spheres, Romania would not be a prime candidate for membership in NATO or the EU. And it was not. Along with other East European states, Romania did negotiate a Europe Agreement, which came into effect in 1995, the same year that Romania formally applied for membership. But in July 1997, despite the positive rhetoric provided by the Ciorbea government, Romanians

were shocked and chagrined when both NATO and the EU left their country off the short list of countries with whom they were willing to start membership negotiations. A report from the EU Commission in 1998 pointed out that “Romania has made very little progress in the creation of a market economy and its capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces has worsened.” Romania has a long way to go, the report concluded.!° Desultory “pre-accession” discussions began, but without enthusiasm.

During 1999, the geopolitical situation changed, and so did Romania's chances for accession to the European Union. When NATO conducted its air war against Serbia in defense of the Kosovar Albanians (discussed later in this chapter), Romania strongly supported NATO, that is, the United States, even though public opinion in Romania was almost unanimously supportive of Serbia.!! The

Kosova affair had an enormous impact on European and American thinking. The dominant powers realized that a stable Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia were important not just for the stability of the Balkans, but indeed for Europe itself. In October 1999, therefore, the EU Commission changed its mind and recommended that formal accession negotiations begin with Romania and Bulgaria (Macedonia was blocked by Greece). In other words, the Commission decided to make its decision regarding Romania and Bulgaria not based so much on their

technical adherence to the acquis, but on the political calculation that having them inside the tent was safer than leaving them outside. Negotiations regarding the first acquis began for Romania in March 2000, and by December 2004 the last of the 31 chapters had been closed.!2 At the same time, it appeared that progress was being made in the economy, as GDP began to grow at a strong rate and inflation moderated. In October 2004 the EU declared Romania to be a functioning market economy. Between then and the final accession, the EU threatened and cajoled, especially in the area of jurisprudence (Romania has still not fully complied in that area), but the EU was committed. Despite last minute nervousness (the final member state to approve the accession treaty— Germany—did not do so until December 26, 2006), on January 1, 2007, Romania finally “rejoined Europe.”

Historian Tom Gallagher takes a jaundiced view of the negotiations that led up to this outcome.!3 He argues that because Romania continued to be run by men who had spent their lives lying both to the Romanian public and to Ceausescu these leaders were well equipped to do the same to EU negotiators, who themselves were blinded by their belief that conditionality would solve all problems. He entitles one of his chapters “Crafty Natives Lead the Eurocrats Astray. There is considerable truth in what Gallagher says. Despite encouraging

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 311

words and earnest promises, not to mention continued pressure from Brussels, Romania remains one of the most problematic states of the European Union. On the other hand, it is highly doubtful that many of the positive aspects of Romanian development over the eighteen years from communism’s collapse until Romania became a member in 2007 would have occurred without pressure from outside. For example, it is not likely, given the extreme anti- Hungarian rhetoric of the far right in Romania, that a treaty of friendship between Romania

and Hungary would have been possible in 1996, and it seems unlikely that the partnership President Iliescu forged with the Hungarian party after his return to the presidency in 2000 would have occurred. That partnership played very well in a Europe that during the 1990s had come to see minorities’ rights as a fundamental part of the European project." Nor is it likely that the progress Romania has made in dealing with antiSemitism would have happened. For generations Romania has had the unfortunate reputation of being one of the most overtly anti-Semitic countries in Europe. Romanian nationalists claim, for example, that no Holocaust took place within the borders of Romania because several hundred thousand Jews survived the war there. They fail to mention that Romanian and Ukrainian troops, encouraged by the wartime Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, slaughtered several hundred thousand others across the border in Bukovina and Transnistria. When nationalists began putting up statues to Antonescu, pressure from abroad forced them to retreat. President Iliescu went further by establishing a blue-ribbon commission headed by Nobel Prize winner (and native son of Romania) Elie Wiesel to investigate the issue. In 2004, when the report confirmed the Romanian role in the Holocaust, President Iliescu, speaking in his formal capacity as president of a country seeking entry into the European Union, broke with a long national tradition by calling Romania’ participation in the Holocaust a “dark chapter in our recent past... [that] must be neither forgotten nor minimized” and agreeing that Antonescu was responsible.!5 On the basis of the commission’s report, Romania established October 9 as Holocaust remembrance day and created the Elie Wiesel Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania. In addition, the Holocaust is supposed to be taught in Romanian schools and Holocaust denial is against the law. Of course anti-Semitism has not disappeared in Romania, far from it, and in actuality only a few hundred schools teach the Holocaust. But for the first time in Romanian experience, the governmental apparatus is formally against antiSemitism, a marked contrast to the situation in the 1930s that surely would not have taken place without outside pressure. One of the main areas in which progress has not been made is in jurisprudence and corruption. Given the nature of Iliescu’s rule, in which the court system was run by former Communist judges who were fully incorporated into the old networks, it was not likely that a transparent rule of law would emerge in Romania under his rule. But in December 2004 the term-limited Iliescu had to step down and a moderate new president, Traian Basescu, appointed a crusading prosecutor, Monica Macovei, as Minister of Justice. Macovei introduced several

312. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

changes, such as getting rid of the ministry's secret service, which had been wiretapping judges. But her main innovation was to hire independent prosecutors and to turn them loose. This proved very effective. After only two years in office, her team had brought about “the indictment of 8 members of Parliament, 2 serving government ministers, a former prime minister, 9 judges and prosecutors, and 70 to 80 police and customs officers.”'6 Not surprisingly, Macovei’s activism infuriated the establishment, including not only Iliescu’s opposition party but even the party of the prime minister, and the reforming prosecutor found herself under relentless personal, political, and professional attack. After little more than two years in office, she had to resign. In mid-2010, the EU continued to report that Romania “demonstrated a degree of unwillingness within the leadership of

the judiciary to cooperate and take responsibility” for reform.’ In fact, rather than confirm commitments it made upon accession, the Romanian parliament seemed to be making corruption easier by prohibiting the appropriate agencies from questioning the accumulation of assets by public figures. As this reaction to efforts at establishing the rule of law suggests, post-Communist Romanian elites have had difficulty confronting their Communist past. In 2006, however, under pressure to do so prior to entering the EU, President Basescu appointed a presidential commission to analyze the Communist dictatorship, appointing American political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu as its

chair and giving him six months to come up with a report.!8 Working feverishly, Tismaneanu’s team presented a 700-page report to Basescu in time for him to present it to parliament in January 2007, just after accession. The report characterized the Communist regime as illegitimate and criminal, accused it of being guilty of genocide, and named names. Basescu accepted the report, but his presentation to parliament turned into a shouting match with angry protests from Iliescu and Tudor (both of whom Tismaneanu named as complicit in Communist crimes). The vicious personal attacks on Tismaneanu and some of his team members, the questions raised by more serious analysts, and the unwillingness of the Romanian political class to confront its continuing role as heirs to the old regime meant that the report did not have the redemptive impact that some had hoped for.

However controversial the Tismaneanu report might have been, the Romanian public is well aware of the political corruption that has characterized post-Communist Romania. Verdery reports, for example, that just after 1989, most of the villagers she knows firmly believed that the courts would deal fairly with them if they had the proper documents to show ownership of their land. By 2000, she says, no one believed that any more. A public survey taken in 1999 indicated that almost 70 percent of the respondents believed that it was impossible to become rich in Romania by honest means.!9 And yet a large number of Romanian NGOs continue their efforts to build a civil society, especially in the cities. Although politics is brutal, as it is elsewhere, elections work reasonably well and the country has experienced three peaceful changes of regime, usually an indicator that democracy has taken hold. Romania is also now a member of

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 313

a political club in which there is a constant peer pressure to improve the operations of the body politic. Whatever the future holds for this country, it will almost certainly be better than what Romania endured in the 20th century.

BULGARIA Bulgaria's post-Communist experience was similar to Romania’s in that most of its leadership in the 1990s consisted of unreconstructed Communists who had little interest in market economies or even in democracy. Bulgaria’s transition experience is often divided in two halves, the first eight years or so of plunder and misrule by networks of rapacious Communists and former security operatives, and the next ten years in which moderate reformers sought to repair the damage and to bring Bulgaria into the European Union. Despite a short interlude of a reform government in 1992, Bulgarian politics after 1989 were almost completely controlled by the successor to Todor Zhivkov's Communist party, now renamed the Bulgarian Socialist party (Bulgarska sotsialisticheska partiya—BSP). Nevertheless, early on Bulgaria took a number of reform steps. Roundtable discussions brought on by massive public demonstrations led to the hurried adoption of a new constitution expressing the framers’ desire that Bulgaria become a democratic state under the rule of law. The government apologized to the Turkish minority for the pressure the previous regime had put upon it, and a new party organized to appeal to Bulgarians of Turkish origin, the Movement for Rights and Freedom (Dvizhenie za prava i svobodi— MRF), emerged. The dissident forces that had played an important role in public demonstrations since 1989 also formed itself into a political party, the Union of Democratic Forces (Sayuz na demokratichnite sili—UDF). On the surface, it appeared that despite confusion and demonstrations, Bulgaria was moving in the right direction. But looks were deceiving. Bulgaria’s president during much of this period, Zhelyu Zhelev, was a moderate, but in Bulgaria's parliamentary system the real power lay with the prime minister, Andrei Lukhanov. A vigorous opponent of capitalism, Lukhanov thought introducing “the market” would be “social sadism.”2° Instead of reforming the economy, Lukhanov used the transitional opportunity to help his friends and associates. He stopped servicing Bulgaria’s foreign debt to preserve state resources, which he then made available to rent seekers. He did away with the supervisory mechanisms the government exercised over the economy, allowed bureaucrats discretion in how they dealt with state assets, and removed sources of information, such as polls, statistics, and records, from state hands, placing them into the hands of private individuals who could use them for their own benefit. In other words, almost immediately after 1989, the anticapitalist nomenklatura and secret service types began dismantling the state so as to prevent it from interfering with their plunder of Bulgaria's main economic asset: the state itself. Venelin Ganev has described in detail the forms this plundering took. There were no important pyramid schemes in Bulgaria, but an analogous scam was the

314 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

success that the Orion Commerce firm had in mobilizing peasants’ money into its own pockets. This group, founded and run by high ranking BSP members and former security operatives, formed an agricultural bank that began raising money in the countryside for the ostensible purpose of establishing agricultural cooperatives to help peasants obtain machinery, fertilizer, and improved seed. The money raising part of the plan was successful, and some peasants invested their fortunes in it. But when the corrupt government that authorized the endeavor was forced to resign late in 1996, it turned out the money had disappeared and the three main organizers had retired to South Africa. Another creative scheme was run by a crook named Kliment Vuchey, a former Communist aparatchik. Appointed Minister of Industry in 2005, Vuchev was strongly opposed to privatization. Accordingly, he created a so-called Industry Fund allegedly to help modernize state-owned industries. By harassing these enterprises to contribute to the fund, he quickly raised 1.7 billion leva. After about a year in office, Vuchev was dismissed for refusing to privatize some firms, whereupon it was discovered that the legal owner of the Industry Fund was not the Ministry of Industry, as one might have assumed, but none other than Kliment Vuchev himself! Efforts to recover the funds were unsuccessful. Ganev provides accounts of many other frauds, some of them significantly

larger than these two. Most of them took place behind the scenes with little public notice while in the meantime the economic picture for most Bulgarians declined precipitously. GDP per capita fell every year after 1989 through 1997, while inflation increased rapidly, so that by the end of 1996 it was over 1,000 percent per year. Then, in 1996, Bulgarian banks began to fail. By the end of that year, the average salary in Bulgaria had sunk to $12 per month, while the average old age pension was a mere $4 per month, making Bulgaria the poorest country in Europe.2! In December 1996 the government of Zhan Videnov, which Ganev calls “the most corrupt, inefficient, and inept government in the post 1989 period not only in Bulgaria but possibly in the entire region,” finally had to resign.?? Bulgaria now descended into crisis, as hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens poured onto the streets to protest government inaction in the face of their despair. The problem was that despite its utter failure, the BSP, which held a majority in the legislature, refused to call a new election and insisted on simply shuffling its ministers around into a new government. At this point, says the noted historian Richard Crampton, “the country was nearer to civil war than at any point since 1989.”23 But fortunately, in November 1996 an election had brought Pettr Stoyanov of the UDF to the presidency, and he found a solution. In a sort of afterthought, the new constitution of 1991 had created a “Consultative National Security Council” with rather vague advisory functions. Latching on to this hitherto unimportant adjunct to government, Stoyanov brought all the relevant political actors together in a meeting and finally got them, including the representative of the BSP, to agree to new elections, which were duly held in April 1997. The BSP suffered an overwhelming defeat at the hands of a coalition led by the UDF, and a reformist government led by Ivan Kostov came into office.

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 315

Ganev stresses the significance of this outcome. Even though observers agreed that Bulgaria had collapsed and was in chaos, the structures established by the constitution of 1991 were followed. The normally not very powerful president was able to bring the antagonistic parties together to produce a fully legal and peaceful solution under extremely difficult circumstances that elsewhere often lead to emergency, nonstandard measures. This constitutional efficacy is not what casual observers of this Balkan country might have expected. Also unexpected has been the success of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court. In a country with no history of judicial review or case law, the court has nevertheless firmly established itself as the final arbiter in jurisdictional and other questions.24 Because of a legal tradition in which judges are less important than prosecutors, where decisions often are not published, and in which academic studies do not inform the courts, the ordinary justice system in Bulgaria leaves much to be desired, as the European Union has observed for many years. But in terms of constitutional issues, the Constitutional Court has succeeded in firmly establishing itself, providing an important ingredient in the rule-based system Bulgaria is still seeking to perfect.

The coming of a new government to power in 1997 decisively turned Bulgaria away from rejection of the Western model.25 One of the first things the reform government did was to stabilize the Bulgarian banking system by reestablishing the Bulgarian National Bank under new rules. The most important of these was the creation of a currency board. This is the name given to the set of strict rules that govern a government’s currency operations.” In the Bulgarian

case, the regulators were required to keep the exchange rate between the lev and the Deutschmark at 1,000 lev (later the three zeros were lopped off) to one deutschmark (later adjusted to take into account the euro). The currency board’s guidelines stabilized the fiscal operations of the government. For example, the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) is not permitted to lend money to the government or act as a lender of last resort to commercial banks, both of which had been disastrous habits of the previous national bank. The BNB must keep sufficient foreign currency reserves to meet any and all demands to convert one currency to the other. The new rules, which Bulgaria has followed well, had an enormous positive effect on the country’s economy, which from 1998 until accession to the European Union had a positive growth rate every year. Within a year, inflation dropped below 10 percent and stayed there. And Bulgaria did not fall into the trap of many European countries as it kept its debt to GNP ratio below 60 percent, something that almost no other European countries have been able to do.?” The government of Ivan Kostov was a breath of fresh air in Bulgarian politics. The new prime minister made Bulgaria more attractive to NATO and the EU, supporting (as did Romania) the allied bombing of Serbia in 1999. He brought a number of young and well trained civil servants into the moribund bureaucracy, started classes in the meaning of the EU in Bulgarian schools, and settled longstanding claims with Macedonia, which had for more than one hundred years been the third rail of Bulgarian politics. He even agreed, at European insistence,

316 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

to shut down the nuclear reactors at Kozludy, even though they supplied 40 percent of Bulgaria's electricity.”8

One would think that he and his government might reap the benefits of these successes. But no such luck.?? As Kostov himself admitted, he had not paid

enough attention to the rise in crime or to corruption and he lost the next election to an entirely unexpected opponent. King Simeon II, exiled since childhood, returned to Bulgaria and in a very short time put together a makeshift party based on his personal charisma. Looking for someone not associated with the past and not likely to be corrupt, voters brought Simeon, now a simple citizen renamed Simeon Saksekoburggotski, to power as prime minister late in 2001.3° “The King,’ as he was usually called by Bulgarians, continued the turn toward Europe begun by the Kostov government. In 2003, aided by an unpopular but strategically pursued policy of supporting the American war in Iraq, Bulgaria joined NATO. Bulgaria also benefited from the decision the EU made in 1999 to go ahead with Romanian and Bulgarian accession for strategic reasons. As in the case with Romania, the main stumbling block was corruption and operation of the courts. The Saksekoburggotski government pushed through an important constitutional amendment in 2003 at the EU’s insistence aimed at limiting the judiciary’s linkage to politics. This helped with the accession process, and by 2004 Bulgaria had closed the last of the acquis. Despite some continuing doubts in European councils, Bulgaria joined the EU on January 1, 2007. Even after 2007,

however, the EU continued to monitor both corruption and the judiciary. For example, in 2009, the UN embargoed payment of almost 500 million euros in agricultural development funds because of various fraudulent activities. A new government elected in 2009 promised, as have most post-1989 governments, to renew the fight against corruption, and the Commission reported in 2010 that some progress had been made, but the problem remained endemic. It is easy to focus on the issue of corruption in Bulgaria in part because so much of it eventually became public, if not successfully prosecuted. But two other issues have had perhaps more long-term impact on the country’s situation. One of them is a sea change in Bulgaria’s international relations, and the other is a structural situation that is difficult to deal with. Since the creation of modern Bulgaria it has been at odds with Turkey, from whose Ottoman predecessor it gained its independence in the 19th century. These relations were not improved during the cold war when Bulgaria was a member of the Warsaw Pact and Turkey of NATO. Relations were further strained by the shabby treatment of Bulgarian Turks in the 1980s. But shortly after 1989 Bulgaria opened a new door toward Turkey, and since that time relations have been stable, even occasionally friendly. The second basic foreign policy improvement has to do with Macedonia. Historically, Bulgaria has considered Macedonians to be Bulgarians. Four times Bulgaria tried to seize Macedonia (1878, 1913, World War I, and World War II) and four times it failed. In the 1930s terrorist outrages by the International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) seriously disrupted Bulgarian public life, and during the Communist period strained debates with Yugoslavia about the creation of the

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 317

Republic of Macedonia were routine. It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when Bulgaria became the first country to recognize Macedonian independence in 1991, although it still does not recognize a Macedonian nation or a separate Macedonian language. In 1999 the two countries signed an agreement with each renouncing any territorial claims on the other. Now that Bulgaria is a member of the EU, however, and Macedonia is aspiring to that goal, Bulgaria may be tempted to use its veto power to put pressure on Macedonia. Nevertheless, improved relations with two long-standing antagonists, Turkey and Macedonia, has helped secure Bulgaria’s geopolitical stability. The second important issue for Bulgaria’s future, not so positive, is its dramatic demographic decline. In 1985 Bulgaria’s population peaked out at almost 9 million people. By 2008 that figure had fallen to about 7.6 million. Three basic factors account for this situation. One is the loss of several hundred thousand Turks who did not return after their expulsion in the 1980s, and a second is the decline in fertility that has characterized the entire European continent in the

past thirty years or so. In 2003 the natural fertility rate in Bulgaria dropped to 1.09 children per woman's lifetime, which Crampton calls the lowest ever recorded for a European state in peacetime.?! But there is another factor as well, one that is impacting not only Bulgaria, but every other Balkan country as well. Hundreds of thousands of mostly skilled young people have emigrated to other parts of the EU, and even elsewhere, since 1989. Population growth has stagnated throughout Europe, but it remains a particular challenge for Bulgaria.

THE WESTERN BALKANS The transition to new forms of governance and economic relations may have been difficult and partial in Romania and Bulgaria, but the problems those two countries faced were child’s play in comparison to the vicious and self defeating disasters that struck most Yugoslav successor states during the 1990s.32 The decade began with the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, the emergence of authoritarian regimes in Serbia and Croatia that led their countries into a brief but costly war, and the outbreak of an even more vicious and many sided war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The decade ended with a NATO attack on Serbia to enforce the rights of Kosovar Albanians followed by the occupation of Kosova by NATO forces, thus leaving both Kosova and Bosnia and Herzegovina as international protectorates. By 2000 all the regions of the former Yugoslavia except Slovenia were devastated, exhausted, unreformed, and seemingly with little hope of getting “back to Europe.” The first decade of the twenty-first century, however, was more positive. In 1999 Franjo Tudjman died, leaving the door open in Croatia to more democratically oriented figures, and even to that country’s candidacy for entry into the EU.33 By 2001, Slobodan Milosevic had been deposed and sent to the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, where he remained until his death in 2006. Serbia has not resolved its issues with Kosova,

whose declaration of independence in 2008 was upheld by the International

318 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Court of Justice in 2010. Nevertheless, despite assassinations and upheavals, along with the separation of Montenegro into a separate country, Serbia turned slightly more toward the west as the decade came to an end. Macedonia survived an incipient civil war and did an admirable job maintaining the peace between its Slavic and Albanian populations, but has been thwarted in its efforts to gain admission to NATO or the European Union by what Ivo Banac calls Greece’s “remarkably stupid” policy of hostility.34

The War in Bosnia Even before the international community recognized the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter simply Bosnia) in April 1992 war had broken out there as forces of the newly named Republika srpska attacked Bosniak (that is, Bosnian Muslim) communities and lay siege to Sarajevo. The atrocities that characterized the war began at once. On May 7 a mortar shell exploded in the midst of a breadline in Sarajevo, killing 20 people and wounding about 100 others. Serbian officials immediately made the implausible claim that Bosnian forces had exploded a mine and killed its own people to gain sympathy and perhaps arms from abroad, although the shell was almost certainly fired by Serbian troops. But the massacre

created a sensation, alerting the international community that the situation in Bosnia had slipped beyond control. Three weeks later the UN Security Council imposed an embargo on economic and military assistance to any of the parties in the spreading conflict.35 The goal of the embargo was to force the warring parties to stop their fighting by denying them the tools of warfare. However, since Slobodan MiloSevic had long since placed much of the arms and personnel of the Yugoslav National Army at the disposal of the Serbian forces in Bosnia, the effect of the embargo was to confirm the military supremacy of the Serbs.26 Bosniak forces had to scramble together their fighting forces from their own resources.37 Importantly for them, the embargo never worked very well, as international arms traders, often backed by Islamic states, began smuggling arms into both Croatia and Bosnia. It took several years, but by 1994 Bosniak forces had redressed the imbalance. The war was especially dispiriting because Bosnia had been the most tolerant and multiethnic part of socialist Yugoslavia. Now people who had been neighbors for years turned on each other, often incited to do so by the most radical elements of each group. The passions of killing and vengeance took over.3* The consequences of this mentality became manifest in the summer of 1992 when two reporters, Ed Vuillamy of The Guardian and Roy Gutman of Newsweek, discovered a group of concentration camps where Serb forces had been subjecting Bosniak civilians to starvation, beatings, and in the case of women, forcible rapes. Pictures of the Omarska camp showing emaciated inmates behind barbed wire were reminiscent of Nazi death camps.2? When a UN Commission of Experts reported early in 1993 that the Omarska camp was only the tip of the iceberg and that atrocious behavior was widespread, not only on the Serbian side, the Security Council decided to create an International Criminal Tribunal for

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 319

the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to investigate and prosecute those responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other abuses.“ The increasing attention given to the war in Bosnia did not mean, however, that Western negotiators were able to find solutions to the conflict. Early in 1993, for example, former U.S. Secretary of state Cyrus Vance and British diplomat David Lord Owen put together a plan to divide Bosnia into ten ethnic cantons.

Secretary Vance succeeded in pressuring MiloSevi¢ to support the plan with the Bosnian Serbs, which he did, but to no avail. In the end, only the Croats accepted the Vance/Owen plan. In the many negotiations that took place from 1991 onward, it always seemed that at least one of the parties involved would prove unmovable. In a civil society, such deadlocks often are resolved through court procedures. In an international setting, however, the only solutions to intransigence are stalemate or force, and until almost the very end of the war, the Western powers, particularly France, Great Britain, and the UN, were extremely reluctant to resort to force. In mid-1993 the United Nations attempted to combine moral suasion with the threat of minimal defensive force by declaring six Bosnian cities under siege by Serbian forces “safe havens,” supposedly immune from military action, and then sending a symbolic number of troops to each of them. These tiny UN forces operated under such limited rules of engagement, however, that they were completely ineffective. For example, UNPROFOR troops, originally inserted into the Serbo-Croatian war early in 1992, saw their mission in Bosnia as simply accom-

panying humanitarian convoys, of which there were many, both public and private, but not actually making sure that convoys got through when they were obstructed. NATO air forces were finally authorized to conduct “out of area” missions, but they were placed under the supervision of a personal representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations. No matter how compelling the need, this official almost never approved the use of air power. Underlying this hesitant policy was the unwillingness of the preeminent military power, the United States, to become involved. Astute Serbian military leaders had realized from the beginning that the West would not use force and had skillfully used this estimate to their advantage. And they were right. The American military did not believe that the cost/benefit ratio was high enough to justify American military involvement in Bosnia. As General Colin Powell put it, “We do deserts. We don’t do mountains,” referring to the successful First Gulf War of 1991 and the complications of dealing with Bosnia’s rugged terrain. So, even though Bill Clinton had criticized President George H. W. Bush for inaction in Bosnia, when he came to office early in 1993 he too hesitated to act. Without a commitment from the United States, the UN, itself wracked by internal conflicts, proved unable to act decisively. To complicate matters, immediately after Bosnia declared independence the Croats in Herzegovina, the southwest portion of Bosnia, created their own para-state (The Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna), and their own army, the Croatian Defense Council (Hrvatsko vijece odbrane—HVO). Franjo Tudjman’s

320 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

government in Croatia, heavily influenced by nationalists of Herzegovinian origin, strongly supported the creation of this entity, supplying arms to the HVO and granting Croatian citizenship to Croats living in Herceg-Bosna. Soon the HVO began attacking Muslim communities with the utmost ferocity.1 They quickly succeeded in ethnically cleansing the Neretva Valley and leveling the Muslim half of Mostar, formerly a mixed city. One of the most noxious physical acts of this war was the bombardment and destruction of the famous sixteenth century Ottoman bridge over the Neretva River. Today, even though the bridge has been rebuilt, Mostar remains a bitterly divided city. The United States, fearing the total collapse of Bosnia, did eventually become involved in this conflict. In March 1994 it coerced the two sides, along with Tudjman’s Croatia, into signing the Washington Agreement, which stopped the fighting and merged the Croatian and Muslim entities into the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The federation was divided into ethnically based cantons and remains, along with Republika srpska, the second element in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile, the war with the Serbs dragged on. By the end of 1993, Serbian forces controlled about 70 percent of Bosnia and still retained the 30 percent of Croatia they had seized in the second half of 1991. Sieges are not usually considered an aspect of modern warfare, although the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was a horrible exception. And yet sieges were common in the Bosnian war. The most notorious was the siege of Sarajevo.42 The city lies in a depression surrounded by mountains from which Serb forces bombarded the city and picked off civilians by sniper fire. Serb forces not only lobbed mortar shells into places they thought civilians might be gathered, such as the KoSevo hospital and two notorious incidents at outdoor markets, but systematically destroyed Bosnian cultural monuments. On May 17, 1992, right at the beginning of the war, they shelled the Oriental Institute, destroying over 5,000 Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, and Turkish codices, and in August they destroyed the National Library, its 1.5 million volumes of Islamic literature consumed by fire.4? Prompted by a desire “to do something,” but not willing to engage in military action, the United Nations brokered an agreement with Serb forces to keep the Sarajevo airport open for humanitarian purposes. But access to the city otherwise was by precarious back road and an 800-yardlong tunnel. By the end of June 1992 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) became the operator of the relief mission. The humanitarian aid provided not only by the UN but by some 200 charitable organizations that arrived over the next few years not only helped Sarajevo survive, but also made it possible for the war to continue. Because the aid could not meet all the city’s needs, a massive black market sprang up, including significant trading between the Sarajevans and their Serb besiegers. Because of the UN presence, Sarajevo's status as a capital city, the ability of newsmen to stay at the shell pocked but still operating Hilton Hotel, and the availability of electronic resources, the Sarajevo saga became the main way most foreigners followed the Bosnian war. That is, until 1995.

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 321

During 1994 the United States, at first secretly and then openly, began to turn a blind eye to the passage of arms to Croatia and Bosnia, especially after the Washington Agreement. The CIA and other special forces also began to provide various forms of covert assistance to the Bosniaks.44 Gradually the military balance in both Croatia and Bosnia began to shift against the previously dominant Serbs because of the new arms, growing problems on the part of the Bosnian Serb army in obtaining spare parts and other war materiel, and the setting in of fatigue in the Serbian ranks. NATO even began to undertake a few air strikes in 1994. When these intensified in 1995 the Serbs responded by seizing some UNPROFOR troops and tying them to military targets, daring NATO to respond. In May 1995, however, the Croats hinted what the new power relations might portend by suddenly seizing the western part of Slavonia, which had been under UN supervision

since 1992, causing most of the Serbs in the region to flee. The Bosnian Serbs reacted with bluster and a grenade shot near the Sarajevo airport, but saved their main response for July, when they attacked and seized Srebrenica.‘ Srebrenica was one of the six cities designated as a “safe area” by the UN and was “protected” by 400 Dutch troops stationed on the outskirts of town. It had been under siege for months and under heavy bombardment for three weeks when on July 6 Serbian General Ratko Mladic ordered his troops to take the city. By July 10 Mladic’s troops were in control. Many of the Bosniak inhabitants successfully fled under terrifying conditions, but by July 12 Serbian forces were able to round up approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys whom they proceeded to massacre over the course of the next few days. As for the Dutch battalion, which was completely outnumbered and unable to convince higher ups to provide air support, the Serbs simply put them on buses and sent them away. Within a week the Serbs also seized Zepa, another “safe haven” and destroyed it albeit without killing all its inhabitants. Not only was the Srebrenica massacre the most clearcut example of genocide in Europe since World War II, it also appeared to some that by using these methods the Serbs had won the war. The international com-

munity, with one exception, seemed helpless to stop the slaughter, even of the most outrageous kind. That exception was the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. On July 25, only two weeks after the Srebrenica massacre, the ICTY indicted the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzi¢ and

General Ratko Mladic, for genocide, inhuman acts, and other crimes against humanity. But the Serbs had not won the war. In August the Croatian army launched an offensive against the breakaway area of Krajina (Operation Storm) and quickly regained it. Some 150,000 Serbian residents of the region fled toward Bosnia and Serbia. Later that month, after another Serb mortar killed three dozen civilians in a Sarajevo market, the United States suddenly decided that it had had enough. Overriding British and French concerns about the safety of their troops on the ground, on August 30 NATO began Operation Deliberate Force, a systematic bombing of Serbian military facilities. At the same time, the Croatian army pondered how far to continue its advance into Bosnia.

322 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Suddenly the tide had turned, and all parties became ready to negotiate. After weeks of shuttle diplomacy, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was able to convince the presidents of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia that peace had become an absolute necessity.“6 The Americans brought Milosevic, Tudjman, and Izetbegovic to Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, where for twenty-one days they engaged in difficult negotiations. Eventually, Holbrook and his team strong-armed the presidents into an agreement to stop the fighting and to establish Bosnia as a single state divided into two territorial entities, the Republika srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, itself consisting of two separately defined Bosniak and Croatian entities. An International Force (IFOR) of as many as 60,000 international troops under NATO (not UN) command would insure that the peace was kept. In December a Peace Implementation Council, representing fifty-five interested states and NGOs, created the position of High Representative, who was to reside in Sarajevo and implement the Dayton Accords. Since 1997 this official has had the right to dismiss Bosnian officials, even judges, and to impose regulations on the often reluctant Bosnians. In other words, after three years of warfare, at least 100,000 deaths, more than two mil-

lion refugees and internally displaced persons, and enormous loss of property and cultural monuments, peace came to Bosnia because the international community, led by the United States, finally became willing to take resolute action.”” The international protectorate over Bosnia was not designed to be permanent, but during the years that have followed, Bosnian leaders have remained at odds with each other and have not been able to write a new constitution for their country. Thus the Dayton Accords, which succeeded in bringing peace but have proven unsuitable for organizing a fully independent state, remain in effect, leaving Bosnia in a semi-permanent condition of limbo.*8

Serbia and Kosova Shortly after socialist Yugoslavia collapsed, Serbia and Montenegro joined together to create what has been called the third Yugoslavia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Allegedly a federation of equal partners, in fact the FRY was dominated in the 1990s by Serbia, that is, by Slobodan MiloSevic. The Serbian ruler consolidated his power by playing the Kosova card and greatly raising the

temperature of Serbian nationalism. Most Serbs were convinced that Kosova was an integral part of their country that could not under any circumstances be released to the control of Albanians, even though Albanians constituted 90 percent of the population there. But MiloSevic was not a nationalist by ideology. Rather he used it and whatever other devices that came to hand to pursue his main goal, which was keeping and exercising power. In fact, by the standards of Serbian politics he was almost a moderate nationalist. To his right was the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski pokret obnove—SPO), headed by the unstable Vuk

Draskovic, and even further to the right was the Serbian Radical party (Srpska radikalna stranka—SRS), or Chetniks, headed by the downright pathological Vojislav Segelj, who often functioned as an ally of Milogevi¢. His opposition

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 323

from the center-left often came in the form of mass gatherings prompted by spontaneous reactions to his actions, for example, on the part of the feminist group Women in Black. In his path to power, MiloSevic had been able to bring out supportive crowds measuring in the hundreds of thousands, but beginning with a mass protest rally in March 1991, repeated again in March 1992, public gatherings became more hostile. Another way that young people expressed their opposition to MiloSevic was to refuse to answer draft calls or to emigrate. From 1992 through 1995 approximately 300,000 persons emigrated from Serbia, most of them young educated professionals. MiloSevic was able to offset these protests and departures, which took place primarily in urban areas, especially Belgrade, with strong support in rural areas, especially in the south. An Albanian boycott of elections in Kosova also helped. It often happened that a handful of Serbian voters in Kosova, essentially all of whom supported MiloSevic’s Serbian Socialist party, were able to return a substantial number of candidates to parliament, thus balancing opposition votes in the urban areas. Despite his background in banking, MiloSevic had surprisingly little understanding of economics. His idea of how to pay for the wars was to print money, which led by 1993 and early 1994 to one of the most spectacular hyperinflations in world history. In January 1994 the rate of inflation was 300,000,000 percent

per month! Installation of a competent finance minister finally brought that crazy figure down, but the country continued to suffer from substantial inflation through the decade. In training and background, Milosevic was a communist bureaucrat, so although he occasionally talked of privatization and other reforms, he ruled like an old fashioned comrade, leading not only to an implosion of the Serbian economy, but to its criminalization. Gangs of young roughnecks, armed by the Serbian state and active in Croatia and Bosnia, returned home to found criminal syndicates that soon dominated the economy, while associates of the ruling party seized control of state enterprises with MiloSevic’s assent. By the mid-1990s, all of the 120 largest enterprises in Serbia were in the hands of party officials, who proceeded to strip their assets to their own advantage. By the time of the Dayton Accords in 1995, official unemployment in Serbia stood at 25 percent, but the actual figure was probably closer to 40 percent. With the end of the wars in 1995 and the disappearance of the justifications they provided, MiloSevic had to resort to increasingly devious methods to stay in power. In the local and regional elections of 1996, for example, his party lost control of 14 cities, including Belgrade. He responded by convincing local courts to annul the elections, but this brought forth the largest sustained demonstrations yet. Despite the bitterly cold Belgrade winter, thousands of protestors ranged the streets for several months, until, pressured by the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and a coalition of parties calling themselves Zajedno (Together), MiloSevic¢ finally relented and an opposition figure, Zoran Djindji¢ of the Democratic party (Demokratska stranka—DS), became mayor of Belgrade.4? Later in 1997 it took all MiloSevic could do to prevent his rival on the radical right, Vojislav SeSelj, from being elected president

324 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

of Serbia. Seelj actually outpolled the second place finisher, but since it was claimed that just under 50 percent of the electorate had turned out the vote was annulled. After considerable turmoil MiloSevic’s candidate, was able to squeeze out a victory. Milosevic himself, having been term limited as president of Serbia, arranged to have himself elected president of the FRY. In either office, of course, he remained in charge of Serbia politics. During the war years, MiloSevic’s government had been able to keep the

Albanians in Kosova down in part because of the nonviolent policy of the Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova. The Albanians had been removed from public life, but had managed to establish an underground school and university system.*°° But the average Kosovar remained marginally employed and poverty stricken. In 1997, however, a new force entered the scene, the Kosova Liberation Army (Ushtria Clirimtara e Kosovés—KLA). Composed of youngish men supported by émigré Kosovar Albanians, the KLA leadership believed that Western intervention was needed if Kosovar Albanians were ever to throw off Serbian domination. The only way to get the attention of the international community, they reasoned, was to abandon Rugovass policy of nonviolence and mount an armed insurgency.

The KLA initiated a few incidents after its founding in 1993, but in 1997 the temporary collapse of public order in Albania allowed it to seize arms needed for a substantial rebellion. With significant firepower now in its hands, the KLA began a regular offensive against Serb targets. Serbian authorities, arguing that the KLA forces were terrorists and should be dealt with accordingly, struck back. The international community responded by freezing Serb assets, reintroducing sanctions, and mobilizing their diplomatic forces. When, by the middle of 1998, KLA guerillas controlled as much as one-third of Kosova, Serbian authorities launched a full-scale offensive, driving more than 200,000 Albanians from their homes. Finally, early in 1999, a Serb massacre of 45 Kosovars in the village of Racak pushed the international community to convene an international conference outside Paris at Rambouillet. The choice for Serbia at these discussions was clear: permit NATO troops to enter Kosova as a peacekeeping force or face a military attack. MiloSevi¢ knew this—Richard Holbrooke made it clear to him on several occasions—but, in his accurate assessment, permitting NATO troops into Kosova would not only infringe on Serbia’s sovereignty but also would lead eventually to the breaking away of Kosova from Serbian control. Refusing NATO permission to enter, he resumed the violent ethnic cleansing in Kosova. Shortly thereafter NATO made good its threat and began air attacks on Serbian targets.

Each side believed that the other side would see the futility of its efforts in a few days, but it did not happen. Frustrated, NATO expanded its target list beyond Kosova, including attacks on important bridges and military buildings in Belgrade itself. At first Serbia neither gave up nor stopped its ethnic cleansing. By May the U.S. Department of State reported that as many as 1.3 million Kosovars had been uprooted from their homes, with the Serbs not only destroying entire villages, but making a special effort to destroy birth records and similar proofs of citizenship.5! That same month the ICTY indicted MiloSevic, the president of

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 325

the FRY, Milan Milutinovic, the president of Serbia, and three other high ranking individuals for crimes against humanity. With MiloSevic not budging, Western powers began considering intensifying their air attacks and even the unpalatable option of using ground forces. Before these dire possibilities came to pass, however, MiloSevic finally caved in.52 On June 10 NATO officially stopped its military actions and within days international troops, including a surprise contingent of Russians, began entering Kosova. Eventually KFOR, as this force was called, reached as many as 40,000

troops. Simultaneously the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1244, which established a UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to begin the rebuilding process there. Despite its designation as an “interim administration,” UNMIK has essentially administered Kosova ever since. Resolution 1244, which recognized the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia while at the same time pledging “substantial autonomy and self government” to Kosova,

did not solve the underlying political problem: the Kosovar Albanians now insisted on complete independence, not merely autonomy, and the Serbs dug in their heels even more firmly against such a possibility. The loss of Kosova was the end for Milosevic, although it took until the elections of September 2000 for him to fall from power. Shortly after the Kosova disas-

ter, sixteen opposition parties banded together as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (Demokratska opozicija Srbije—DOS) and named Vojislav Kostunica as their leader. KoStunica was a real Serbian nationalist, unlike Milosevic. He was critical of the NATO bombing and supported Serbs in Kosova. On the other hand he was respected for having kept his hands clean during the MiloSevi¢c years and for what some considered honest and principled behavior.53 When the election finally came along it was close. The government said that the first round of elections were inconclusive and called for a second round, but exit polls conducted

by the DOS indicated that KoStunica had won outright. When the supreme court, which MiloSevic controlled, annulled the first round of the election on October 5, a semi-spontaneous popular revolt broke out in Belgrade and other towns. Confronted by urgings from Russian advisors, from Metropolitan Pavle of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and by his own senior military and civil officials, the next day MiloSevic stepped down. After a period of initial confusion, a new government headed by Zoran Djindjic took power in January 2001. But Milosevic remained under indictment by the ICTY. What to do? Djindji¢, the prime minister, who was Western oriented, favored extradition. KoStunica, the new president, favored at most a local trial, and certainly not letting Milosevic out of Serbian jurisdiction. But Djindjic secretly outmaneuvered his president, and on June 28, 2001, the most sacred of the Serbian holidays, the one commemorating the Ottoman defeat of the Serbian forces at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, MiloSevic was seized and put on a plane to The Hague. He died of natural causes in 2006 in the midst of his sensational trial.*4 In Kosova UNMIK quickly established Provisional Institutions of SelfGovernment in Kosova, that is, a working government that supposedly did not

326 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

imply independence. By 2004 the UN Security Council agreed on a set of standards that Kosova would have to meet before talks could begin about its future status.55 A document of over 100 pages spelled out hundreds of specific things Kosova had to do to achieve a functioning democracy, a well-functioning economy, rule of law, stable property rights, freedom of movement, and other goals. Achieving these standards before Kosova’s status could be discussed (thus the slogan “standards before status”) would have been difficult for a stable democracy with a substantial history behind it. For a region with a volatile record of interethnic violence, 70 percent unemployment, few economic prospects, and no experience in the politics of accommodation, it was almost impossible. A substantial portion of the Serbs in Kosova lived north of the Ibar River, which cut the community of Mitrovica in half. Because of Serbian resistance, UNMIK was never able to establish its full presence there. Belgrade, meanwhile, paid the salaries of Serb administrators in the region, while Serbian and Albanian gangs prevented each other from freely crossing the main bridge across the Ibar, thus essentially partitioning northern Kosova off from the south. While to outside observers this situation suggested the possibility of a solution by means of a territorial swap, northern Kosova to Serbia and the PreSevo Valley (a heavily Albanian populated region in Serbia) to an independent Kosova, both sides adamantly rejected even a hint that this might be possible.5° As time went on, the international community slowly began inching toward the realization that independence for Kosova was inevitable, even if it did not meet the standards exactly. Early in 2007, the UN administrator for Kosova, Martti Ahtisaari, proposed to the Security Council that Kosova be granted “supervised independence,” but opposition from Russia prevented agreement. Later in the year, however, a new Kosovar prime minister, Hashim Thaci, declared that Kosova would declare independence on its own, which it did on February 17, 2008. The United States and a few others immediately recognized the new country, but UNMIK and IFOR remained in the country.57 Even when the International Court of Justice ruled the declaration legal in 2010, Serbia resolutely refused to change its position that Kosova was an integral part of Serbia, and Kosova’s status continued to bedevil the central Balkans.

Croatia Turns the Corner; Serbia Tries to If we consider the fact that Croatia was the second most prosperous republic in socialist Yugoslavia, was Catholic, and had historic links with the Habsburg empire, it might have seemed reasonable to assume that it would find itself on a path “back to Europe” similar to that of Slovenia.5* But that was not the case in the 1990s for two reasons. First of course were the wars of 1991-1995. No country

could have been expected to shift to democratic and market norms smoothly when one-third of its territory had been occupied by a hostile neighbor. But Croatia could not have made the shift easily under any circumstances with the leadership it had during the 1990s. Franjo Tudjman was different than Slobodan Milosevic in many ways, but he also displayed authoritarian tendencies and was

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 327

equally prone to transfer ownership of economic assets to his family or to political cronies. Opinions of Tudjman’s personality range from a “patient, cultured, and charming man who could explode in anger,’ to “a ruthless dandy and arrogant coward,” or, as regards his work as a historian, “a martinet who plagiarized the work of his staff."s° Tudjman proved to be a patriarchal leader who viewed himself as Father of the Croatian Nation and therefore entitled to make unilateral decisions in both large and small matters.

Croatia retained the trappings of democracy, a “simulated democracy” Mieczystaw Boduszynski calls it, and Tudjman and his party continued to win elections.°° With each electoral victory Tudjman’s regime became more autocratic, clamping down on the media, lagging in economic reform (one Croatian economist called the Croatian privatization program “an all-out failure”), and

blaming “Europe” for whatever went wrong. Playing the nationalist card at home proved successful in the short run, but “Tudjman’s corrupt, bigoted, and Pan-Croatian nationalism” had the adverse effect of turning Croatia into almost as much a pariah state as Serbia.® It was denied entry into NATO’s Partnership for Peace, saw economic aid programs from the EU curtailed, was not admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and fell off the list of countries slated to be the first East European entrants into the European Union. But in 1997 Tudjman contracted stomach cancer. His grip faltered, and in 1999 he died. At the moment Tudjman died Croatia was suffering from a recession, brought on in good measure by the war, although the government’s post-Communist mismanagement of the economy did not help matters.*3 Tudjman’s privatization policies had resulted in many of the larger Croatian enterprises ending up in state hands, where they provided employment opportunities and graft possibilities for his supporters. In its parochial efforts to protect Croatian assets from the rigors of foreign competition, the Tudjman regime, much like the Klaus regime in the Czech Republic, condemned these assets to mediocre performance. By 1999, when the economy dipped, unemployment, or worse, nonpayment of wages for those nominally employed, had become a serious problem. Opposition parties had not been able to muster the strength to defeat Tudjman while he was alive, but the fact that democratic forms had been maintained meant that once he did pass from the scene, competition for office emerged, even for leadership of Tudjman’s now leaderless party, the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica—HDZ). In elections held only two months after Tudjman’s death, a coalition of Western-oriented parties led by reformer Ivica Rac¢an took control of the government. Shortly thereafter Stipe Mesic¢, a liberal minded former Communist, was elected president. In November of 1990, under the leadership of these two moderates, the Croatian legislature revised the constitution, changing the form of government from a presidential one, which had favored Tudjman, to a parliamentary style, thus limiting presidential powers. With these changes, all taken within a year of Tudjman’s death, the Croatian battleship began to turn. The first and second post-Tudjman governments introduced serious economic reforms, began to try Croatian war criminals, and sought

328 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

to deal with corruption. The second of them even submitted a formal application for membership in the European Union early in 2003. But it was the government of Ivo Sanader, which took office in December 2003, that really got Croatia going in pursuit of EU membership. In 2002 Sanader emerged as the head of the HDZ, winning an internal struggle with the party’s ultra-conservative elements, which thereupon broke away from the HDZ to form their own right wing party. Taking control of the more moderate elements in the HDZ, Sanader was able to claim conservative continuity with the past while at the same time shifting to a Western-oriented direction. As early as 2004, the EU Commission reported that “Croatia is a functioning democracy, with stable institutions guaranteeing the rule of law,” and that it “can be regarded as a functioning market economy.”* In other words, Croatia was eligible to begin membership negotiations. Making the huge number of legal and administrative changes to meet the acquis would have been hard enough for Croatia, but two special issues made it even more difficult. The first was the difficulty of meeting the insistence of the

ICTY that the government arrest and turn over any Croat the court indicted. High ranking Croats indicted by the court tended to be charged with aiding and abetting atrocities committed by Croatian troops when they overran the Krajina in 1995. The rub was that it was just these generals whom many Croats considered national heroes for finally defeating Serbia in the “Homeland War.” Mesi¢ and Sanader both wanted to cooperate with the ICTY, but the likelihood of a nation-

alist reaction that would thwart their reform efforts made them hesitate. The European Union, on the other hand, had made cooperation with the ICTY one of the fundamental conditions for pursuing membership. From 1993 to 1995 the EU complained that Croatia was not cooperating enough and postponed starting membership negotiations. Finally, in 2005, when Croatian intelligence services reported to Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the ICTY, that they had located General Ante Gotovina, the commanding general of the offensive against Krajina and the main symbolic figure both of Croatian victory and of national resistance to the ICTY, in the Canary Islands, del Ponte certified that Croatia was cooperating fully and accession negotiations resumed.* A few months later Gotovina was arrested in Tenerife and sent to The Hague for trial. By this time prime minister Sanader was in sufficient control of the situation that he was able to contain the nationalist backlash and negotiations with the EU went forward.

A second problem unique to the Croatian quest for EU membership was a controversy over who controlled which portions of the Adriatic Sea around the small Slovenian port of Piran, which provides Slovenia its only commercial access to the Adriatic and Mediterranean. The claims of Croatia and Slovenia overlapped. Slovenia saw its version justified by its need to have unfettered access for its trade, while Croatia seemed to be motivated by notions of its sovereignty and pride. Almost twenty years of negotiation, inflamed on both sides by petty nationalistic outbursts, could not resolve the question. Despite the seemingly smallness of the issue in the larger scheme of things, the dispute proved vital

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 329

to Croatia, because for it to enter the EU, it had to have the unanimous consent of all EU members, and Slovenia was a member. Slovenia made it known that it would not accept Croatia until this issue was solved. The situation so angered and depressed Sanader, who had done an excellent job of shepherding Croatia from Tudjman’s dictatorship to readiness for membership, that in 2009 he unexpectedly resigned, even though Croatia had been admitted to NATO three months before. But in 2010, finally, both sides agreed to submit the Piran controversy to an international arbitration commission and to abide by its decision. By mid2010, twenty of the thirty-three chapters of the acquis had been closed and it

appeared likely that Croatia, after a decade of anticipation and preparation, would become a member of the EU.

Serbia made an important turn in the first decade of the twenty-first century too, but lagged behind Croatia in many regards. Croatia continued to suffer from a strong conservative presence, but the right did not have the same high level of electoral support that similar movements did in Serbia. Tudjman’s regime had been corrupt, but criminal elements had not penetrated as deeply into the fabric of society as was the case in Serbia. And Croatia found a leader in Sanader who was able to bring together the six parties of his coalition into a more or less unified force that gave the country direction. A similar kind of leader did emerge in Serbia after Milosevic departed for The Hague: Zoran Djindji¢. Relatively young, charismatic, and most of all pragmatic rather than ideological, Djindji¢ saw Serbia’s future as aligned with the West. After the victory of the Democratic Opposition in December 2000, Djindji¢ became prime minister and began to cooperate with the ICTY, consider economic reforms, and even confront the entrenched criminal elements. But unlike the situation in Croatia, where President Mesi¢ and Prime Minister Sanader were more or less on the same page, in Serbia President Vojislav KoStunica vigorously opposed Djindji¢’s policy of cooperation with the ICTY and was outraged to be kept out of the loop when MiloSevic was extradited and sent off to The Hague. He attacked Djindjic by charging him with criminal activity, when in fact Djindji¢ was trying to tame the violent atmosphere in Belgrade, where street killings of gang leaders, politicians, and journalists were common. Djindji¢c’s job was not made any easier either by the constant pressure from the United States and Europe to cooperate ever more fully with the ICTY. In the end, Djindji¢ was brought down not by election or loss of a vote of confidence, but by hired gunmen who shot him dead in March 2003. The strong reaction of his successor to this disaster did go a certain way toward bringing some of the most notorious criminal elements to justice, eventually including the gang that perpetrated the assassination, but it also threw the Serbian reform process into confusion.* By the end of the year the DOS coalition had collapsed and shortly thereafter KoStunica, having stepped down as president, became prime minister.®8 It took about a year and a half of repeated elections to choose KoStunica’s replacement as president. Finally in mid-2004 Boris Tadic took office, where he remained for the rest of the decade.

330 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

The thing that frightened Western observers about the various elections, successful and unsuccessful, that followed Djindjic’s assassination was the strong showing of the Serbian Radical party, despite the fact that its leader Vojislav Seselj

was in prison awaiting trial for murder, torture, and cruel treatment. Tomislav Nikoli¢, substituting for SeSelj, proved to be a strong contender for president, polling as much as 45 percent of the vote and coming close at one point to becoming speaker of the Serbian parliament. Since the Radicals continued to advocate

the creation of a Greater Serbia, reveled in extreme rhetoric, and rejected the legitimacy of the ICTY, every good showing of the party evoked strong reactions from Europe and lent plausibility to Serbia’s international status as a pariah state. Nevertheless, KoStunica’s government permitted indicted individuals to surrender, even paying subsidies to their relatives, and tried to negotiate a Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU. This device, introduced by the EU for the Western Balkans in the late 1990s, was considered a first step in a process that would eventually lead to membership, but was far short of acceptance as an actual candidate. Negotiations began in 2005, but it was not until May 2008 that an agreement was signed and not until early 2011 that all the members of the European Union finally agreed to put it into effect. At a time when Croatia was possibly on the verge of membership, Serbia was only at an early stage of what promised to be a lengthy process. If Croatia had difficulties with the ICTY at least it eventually solved them. Serbia was never able to get the ICTY off its neck because until mid-2011 it failed to deliver Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic¢, the last two of the 161 indictees who

remained still at large. Radovan Karadzic was arrested in 2008, but General Mladic was especially important because he was the commanding officer at the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. For many years most Serbs refused to believe that such a massacre had even occurred, although a video shown on Serbian television in 2005 that depicted Serbian troops actually mistreating and then killing Bosnian Muslims began to crack the solidarity of that opinion. When Mladi¢ and Hadzic were finally arrested by Serbian security forces in 2011, it greatly enhanced Serbia’s chances of being taken seriously by the European Union. Many Serbs, however, do not seem worried about their problems with the ICTY or about the Kosova albatross around their neck. A large minority of the country remains anti-Western, believing that good standing with the EU is not the be all and end all of international possibilities for Serbia. A long history of friendship with Russia, even during the Soviet period, coupled with the support that Russia has given Serbia in the UN and the country’s dependence on Russian oil and gas have combined to suggest to these elements that perhaps Russia would make a better ally than Europe, or at least a counterweight to the enormous pressure European conditionality continues to place on Serbia. Resentments arising from the NATO bombing in 1999 linger and continue to support such a view. Whether such a possibility can outweigh the enormous benefits of EU membership in the long run, however, remains doubtful. Serbia’s geopolitical position in

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 331

the center of the Balkans gives it an importance there similar to that of Germany

in Central Europe: a democratic and prosperous Germany means stability in Central Europe. A democratic and prosperous Serbia would go a long way toward achieving stability in the Balkans, if only Serbia could focus its full attention on that goal.

Montenegro Small though it is—the population is only about 600,000—Montenegro has its own history as a craggy country that resisted the Ottoman Empire and became independent in the nineteenth century. After World War I it became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and following World War II it became one of the six republics of socialist Yugoslavia. Montenegrins are Orthodox Christian and speak Serbian (although today they call it Montenegrin). About 40 percent of its population has traditionally seen themselves as Serbian, with about 40 percent have seen themselves as distinctly Montenegrin. When socialist Yugoslavia collapsed Montenegro enthusiastically (96 percent in a referendum) cast its lot with Serbia, forming in 1992 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Montenegrin President Momir Bulatovic supported and was supported by Slobodan Milosevic, and Montenegrin troops participated in the Serbian war against Croatia by attacking Dubrovnik. Bulatovic’s prime minister was Milo Djukanovic, a very young politician (he was 29 when he became prime minister) with an eye toward the future. The political history of Montenegro from the formation of the FRY until Montenegro

became fully independent in 2006 almost can be written as a competition between these two men. As the 1990s wore on, Montenegrins became less and less enchanted with MiloSevic, and therefore with Bulatovic. Djukanovic began flirting with the possibility of Montenegrin independence, although a good third or more of the country’s population was in favor of staying with Serbia. In 1998, Milosevic changed some of the rules of the FRY to favor his own election as president. From that moment on Serbia and Montenegro engaged in open, bitter conflict. Even after MiloSevic left the scene, the much smaller Montenegro felt bullied and overwhelmed by the larger Serbia, and sentiment for independence grew stronger, although still passionately disputed. In 2002, Javier Solana, negotiator for the EU, more or less forced a compromise between the two parties, which created a new entity, the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (it came into being in early 2003). Part of this agreement was that Montenegro would put off consideration of independence for three years. But in 2006, Djukanovic, who by this time had decisively sidelined Bulatovic, managed to stage a referendum by which the Montenegrin voters narrowly approved declaring independence.® Serbia did not object, and the transition was peaceful. As Montenegro edged away from Serbia it took some unusual economic measures. Foremost was its adoption of the German mark as it official currency, which led in 2002 to the adoption of the euro. Although not formally a member of the euro community, adoption of the mark and then the euro helped support

332 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

a reform of the banking system and other changes that significantly benefited the small Montenegrin economy. Whereas Serbia has undergone very little significant privatization, the majority of the Montenegrin economy is now in private hands. This also means that a significant portion of it is involved with illicit activities, particularly smuggling, an activity often charged to Djukanovic himself.70 An openness to outside investment has also led to an influx of foreign purchases of desirable real estate along its beautiful Adriatic Coast, particularly by Russians, toward whom the Montenegrins have always been friendly. In general, Europe has reacted positively. Montenegro has been admitted to the Partnership

for Peace program and is a candidate for NATO membership. Its Stabilization and Association Agreement came into effect in 2010 and late in that year it officially became a candidate for membership in the EU.

Macedonia Until the emergence of nation states in the Balkans, the term Macedonia referred to a region, not a country. In 1913, after the Second Balkan War, it was divided up among Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria, and in 1945 the Serbian portion was established as the sixth republic of the new socialist Yugoslavia. Macedonian scholars

and politicians went about differentiating their language from Bulgarian and Serbian, consolidating historical traditions, and solidifying a sense of Macedonian identity. With the collapse of Yugoslavia the young nation was left with no choice but to declare its independence, which it did in November 1991. Macedonia entered into its new life as an independent country with many deficits. Primary among them was the country’s poverty. It had been the least prosperous of the six Yugoslav republics and had no industries that could compete on an international scale, having been supported by subsidies from the rest of Yugoslavia for decades. Neither elites nor publics had any experience with pluralist politics or market systems, and the country even lacked a supply of potential public servants outside those left over from the Communist party. Furthermore, the country had several nonSlavic minorities, the largest being Muslim Albanians, who constituted from 20 to 25 percent of the population. One asset Macedonians did have, however, was the man they elected as president, a cagey old Communist leader named Kiro Gligorov. Unusual in that he was respected by all ethnic groups, Gligorov provided the negotiating skills that kept the country together during the rough times of the 1990s.

Macedonia introduced all the formal trappings of democratic institutions, including a constitution, elections, and parliament, but from the very beginning controversies, often revolving around ethnic resentments, arose. For example, the constitution, adopted just prior to the declaration of independence, stated that Macedonia was the national state of the Macedonian people with full equality for others. As in other states that adopted this kind of wording, such as Croatia, the main minority, in this case Albanians, objected. Eventually the constitution was changed, but only after bitter struggles. The main political parties that emerged in the first few years were surprisingly accommodating to each other, with Macedonians offering Albanians ministerial

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 333

posts and Albanian parties urging their co-nationals to remain calm when crises cropped up. This led many observers to be optimistic about Macedonia’s ability to tamp down the volatility of ethnic politics rampant elsewhere. But on both the Macedonian and Albanian sides nationalist parties emerged that challenged this arrangement. Almost every issue became ethnically charged. No matter what concessions the Macedonian side considered, or at what speed they offered them, there were sure to be protests from some element among the Albanians that the changes offered were too few or too slow. On the other hand, no matter how minor the concessions offered, there were sure to be Macedonians who characterized them as unjustified capitulations to the Albanians. A good example of the severity of the conflicts took place when some Albanians attempted to establish a private university in Tetovo so that young Albanians could continue their education in their own language, which was otherwise not possible in Macedonia. The Macedonian government promptly shut down the school, allegedly for failure to follow the relevant rules, a claim that did not convince the Albanians. Several years later an Albanian language university was permitted to open alongside the Macedonian language one, but the cost in lost public trust was enormous. Macedonia did not enter into nationhood with the same sense of euphoria as, say, Czechoslovakia, and its new institutions quickly began to lose public confidence. As elsewhere, corruption of the privatization process was one of the reasons, but another was that the economy, poor to begin with, got progressively worse. Unemployment went from about 23 percent in 1990 to almost 50 percent in 1999, industrial production dropped 43 percent “in the first five years of transition,’ and the GDP per capital dropped from $2,200 to $700 over the same period.7! Several factors led to these dismal results, but important among them was the purposeful effort of Greece to undermine the Macedonian state. Greece objected to the fact that its neighbor called itself “The Republic of Macedonia,” on the spurious claim that this implied Macedonian territorial ambitions toward northern Greece. Not only did the Macedonians formally deny this on many occasions, but the thought that a nation of 2 million people with essentially no military forces posed a threat to a relatively prosperous one of 11 million was absurd. The real Greek position was the parochial claim that because the name “Macedonia” belonged to Greece and only Greece it could not be used by anyone else. After the United States brokered Macedonia’s entry into the United Nations as “The Former Yugoslavia Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM) further discussion about the name broke down. Greece imposed a blockade on the already poor and powerless Macedonia in February 1994. Not until Macedonia changed its flag and made other concessions did the Greeks relent in November 1995. But since most of Macedonia’s trade was through the Greek port of Thessaloniki, the damage to the already weak Macedonian economy was severe. Macedonia has continued to endure Greek hostility over the name issue ever since. Macedonia managed to avoid sustained violence through much of the 1990s, often through the Gligorov’s interventions. But late in the decade the emergence of the KLA in Kosova, the huge if temporary flood of refugees from Kosova during

334. THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

the NATO bombing in 1999, and an influx of militant paramilitary forces from Kosova led to the outbreak in 2001 of serious violence in the Albanian regions of Macedonia.”? The international community, fearing another Bosnia, responded vigorously. At first it favored the government, but quickly the European negotiators came to the view that it was the government that had to provide satisfaction to the Albanians. By the Ohrid Agreement, reluctantly signed by a nationalistic prime minister in August 2001, the government agreed to change the wording of the preamble to the constitution, make Albanian an official language in communities having more than 20 percent Albanian population, and grant amnesty to the rebels. It proved very difficult to carry through on these and other promises, but eventually the forms of equality were adopted and the administration was decentralized in a way that gave Albanians significant local control. But it was not easy, and the process inflamed the passions evoked by the “almost-war’ of 2001. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century Macedonia had made some progress in its efforts to enter Europe. In December 2005 it was recognized as a candidate, although by 2010 negotiations had not progressed appreciably because Greece continued to disrupt the process over the name issue. The same could be said for entry into NATO. Although Macedonia entered the Partnership for Peace in 2005, Greece has consistently vetoed its acces-

sion to full membership. For these reasons, the normally positive impact of EU conditionality is not working as well in Macedonia as it has elsewhere, although the Western powers continue to exercise considerable influence in Macedonian politics. Economic growth resumed, but from a depressed start point and at a modest rate. Unfortunately, ethnic politics will probably continue to characterize Macedonian politics into the future. As Robert Hislope puts it, “the cleavage lines that separate the ethnic groups are firm and deep....[T]he system is afforded no relief from the pressure of politicized ethnicity.” And finally there is Greece. Polls show that most Slavic Macedonians (although not most of the Albanians) were willing to give up entry into NATO or the EU rather than give up the name “Republic of Macedonia.” It appeared in 2010 that giving up entry into those institutions was exactly what Greece would continue to force them to do.

Albania Albania was never part of Yugoslavia, but today it is grouped together with that country’s remnants as part of the “Western Balkans.” More isolated and repressive under communism than any other socialist state, with the possible exception of North Korea, Albania started its transition poorer, with fewer human resources, and with less prior political experience than any other east European country. Almost immediately the state socialist economic system collapsed in what Albanians call “the time of dark forces.””3 Inefficient and outdated industrial enterprises simply stopped producing, civil order disintegrated, and thousands of refugees crowded onto ships and headed for southern Italy. A law of 1991 abolished the Communist agricultural cooperatives so that by the end of 1992, 90 percent of agricultural land was in the hands of peasant households, which

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 335

as late as 2004 comprised 58 percent of the Albanian workforce and accounted for more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. This minimally organized change made an already unproductive agricultural sector even less productive, since the average holding of each peasant household was about two and one half acres, not enough to move beyond subsistence agriculture. Furthermore, a market in real estate could not develop because a second law of 1993 offered restitution to pre1946 landowners, resulting in endless title disputes between the former owners or their heirs and the peasants who were actually farming the land. Unfortunately, this economic collapse took place within a chaotic banking and regulatory environment. Lacking a viable banking system that would provide credit and capital, entrepreneurs began creating private investment enterprises based primarily on cash. Some of these provided a legitimate way to create investment resources from the country’s main source of foreign exchange, which was cash transfers from the Albanian diaspora, but at the same time the unregulated system encouraged criminal activities that rely on cash, such as smuggling and money laundering. Alongside some legitimate companies, a number of less legitimate firms emerged that were actually ponzi schemes, like Caritas in Romania.” In a country with absolutely no experience in modern economic life, the high returns that pyramid schemes offered became extremely popular. And then, suddenly, in the second half of 1996, a veritable frenzy of absurd interest offers and resultant buying created a bubble. Citizens who had never invested

in anything sold their homes or livestock to buy shares in one or another of the plans. One company alone brought in a million small investors, and this in a country with a population of only 3.6 million people. After a few months of excited expectations, the bubble burst. Within a few weeks hundreds of thousands of Albanians saw their life savings disappear. In the long run, the effect on the Albanian economy was limited, in part because the government courageously held firm to a policy of not bailing out the collapsing investment companies, letting them fail even though it hurt individuals and made a few crooked entrepreneurs rich. But the immediate effect was dramatic. Early in 1997 violent protests broke out that the government was unable to control. Insurgent groups in the southern part of the country began to seize arms from the poorly guarded national armories. Within a few weeks more than half a million weapons were seized by various armed bands (a substantial amount of these ended up in the hands of the Kosova Liberation Army). The government lost control of maybe a third of the country. One reason the collapse was so complete was the incompetence of the government itself. In 1992 after several false starts, the Democratic Party of Albania (Partia Demokratike e Shqipéris¢é—DP) won an election and its leader Sali Berisha became president. Berisha was popular and intelligent, and he pursued a neoliberal program that made him popular as well with some elements in the West. But

he also had a powerful authoritarian streak. Justifying himself with vigorously anti-Communist rhetoric, Berisha arrested the leaders of the former Communist party of Albania, now renamed the Party of Labor of Albania (Partia e Punés e

336 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Shqipérisée—PLA), purged the army and even his own party of those who were not loyal enough to him personally, clamped down on a resurgant press, and used the radical liberalization of the economy to benefit himself and his associates. A long-standing member of the Tirana political elite, which had changed little in composition or habits since Communist times, Berisha became increasingly isolated in the company of his closest supporters. So when the collapse of early 1997 came, opposition to his rule contributed to the severity of the outbreaks. This opposition was especially vigorous in the south, closest to Greece, where

sympathy for the socialist party was strongest. Violent outbursts, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes led by the socialists, quickly led to the seizure of much of the coastal area and many cities in the south by armed rebels. For a few weeks it appeared that a civil war based on the traditional Albanian north/south divide was about to break out.”5 After a few months of violent chaos, which brought about intervention from Italy and others, Berisha finally resigned. A new and irregular election took place, and Fatos Nano, Berisha’s socialist rival now released from prison, became prime minister. With the country a shambles and with Berisha doing his best to disrupt his regime, Nano himself was forced out by his socialist rivals within a year. For about two years this new government earned Western praise for their economic policies and their campaigns against corruption. But Nano and Berisha are nothing if not relentless. The former took over again from 2002 to 2005, while in 2005 Berisha returned to what seems to be semi-permanent power. Albanian politics continues to be plagued by rigged elections, by the refusal of defeated parties to accept election results, and by the constant efforts of those out of power to undermine, discredit, and destroy those in power. Albania’s leaders have always spoken as if they want their country to join

the European Union, and on occasion they have acted as if they wanted to propitiate the West.” Berisha, for example, has always hewed closely to a proUnited States policy.77 During the 1999 NATO operation against Serbia, Albania accommodated several hundred thousand Kosova refugees whom it could ill afford to take in and supported the NATO campaign against Serbia diplomatically. In return the EU promised a Stabilization and Association Agreement. But the EU quickly realized that Albania was not close to meeting the Copenhagen requirements for accession and reneged on its promise. Albania did sign a stabilization agreement in 2006 that entered into force in 2009, and in the same year it applied for membership. But in the anodyne language of the EU progress report of that year, the country still “needs to reform and strengthen its legal system and address weaknesses in infrastructure and human capital.”78 With its politics still characterized by stubborn, anything goes, personal infighting, and a public that has come to see politics as the problem rather than the solution, Albania may have to wait until a new generation, not formed under the insular communism of thirty years ago, takes the stage before it makes real progress toward entry into Europe.”

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 337

NOTES 1. Ian Bogdan Vasi, “The Fist of the Working Class: The Social Movements of the Jiu Valley Miners in Post-Socialist Romania,” East European Politics and Societies 18, no. 2 (2004): 132-157; and John Gledhill, “States of Contention: State-Led Political Violence in Post-Socialist Romania,” East European Politics and Societies 19, no. 1 (2005): 76-104. 2. David A. Kideckel, Getting By in Post-Socialist Romania: Labor, the Body, & Working Class Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 3. Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

4. Verdery, Vanishing Hectare, 360. 5. Katherine Verdery, “Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids, Romania, 1990-1994,” in her What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 168-203. 6. Here is Verdery’s devastating view: “Postsocialist Romanian politics, then, bears the monstrous stamp of the Ceausescu period, its state not strong but weakened by parasitism, barely controlled anarchy, and scavenging on the part of virtually everyone” (Verdery, Vanishing Hectare, 113). 7. Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, The Balkans: A Post-Communist History (London: Routledge, 2007), 153. 8. For a series of excellent essays on lustration and similar issues throughout Eastern

Europe, see Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoning with the Communist Past, ed. Lavinia Stan (London: Routledge, 2009).

9. For very useful data on every election held in Eastern Europe through 2008 see Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Parties and Elections in New European Democracies (Colchester, England: ECPR, 2009). 10. EU Commission report quoted by Dimitris Papadimitriu and David Phinnemore, Romania and the European Union: From Marginalisation to Membership (London: Routledge, 2008), 42. 11. Tom Gallagher, Theft of a Nation: Romania Since Ceausescu (London: Hurst & Company, 2005), 215. Nevertheless, a majority of Romanians at this time favored

joining NATO (bid., 387, fn. 17). Romania continued its support for the United States after the 9/11 attack on the United States, providing staging bases for American forces and sending personnel to the war in Iraq. Romania joined NATO in 1994. 12. Papadimitriu and Phinnemore, Romania and the European Union, 47. 13. Tom Gallagher, Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2009). 14. For example, see the chapter “Triumph in Transylvania” in Patrick C. McMahan, Taming Ethnic Hatred: Ethnic Cooperation and Transnational Networks in Eastern Europe (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007). 15. “Speech given by Mr. Ion Iliescu, President of Romania, at the meeting dedicated

to the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Romania—October 12, 2004,” accessed September 7, 2010, http://yad-vashem.org.il/about_yad/what_new/data_whats_new/ pdf/english/003_Speech_given_by_Ion_Iliescu_October_12%202004.pdf 16. Matthew Brunwasser, “For Romanians, Many Questions,’ International Herald Tribune, January 2, 2007.

338 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

17. “Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on Progress in Romania under the Co-operation and Verification Mechanism,” COM(2010)401/F, July 20, 2010, accessed September 9, 2010, http://eur-lex.europa. eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0401:FIN:EN:PDF 18. Monica Ciobanu, “Criminalising the Past and Reconstructing Collective Memory: The Romanian Truth Commission,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 2 (March 2009):

313-336; Charles King, “Remembering Romanian Communism,” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 718-723; Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Confronting Romania's Communist Past: A Response to Charles King,” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 724-727; Ruxandra Cesereanu, “The Final Report on the Holocaust and the Final Report on the Communist Dictatorship in Romania,” East European Politics and Societies 22, no. 2 (2008): 270-281. 19. Gallagher, Theft of a Nation, 246.

20. Venelin I. Ganev, Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria after 1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 45. This section on Bulgaria relies heavily on Ganev’s superb study.

21. Venelin I. Ganev, “Ballots, Bribes, and state Building in Bulgaria,’ Journal of Democracy 17, no. 1 January 2006): 78. 22. Ganev, Preying on the State, 139. 23. R. J. Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 406.

24. For a good description of Bulgarian legal traditions and practice, see Bruno Schonfelder, “Judicial Independence in Bulgaria: A Tale of Splendour and Misery,” Europe-Asia Studies 57, no. 1 (January 2005): 61-92.

25. For a thorough description of this turn and the crisis that produced it see Tsveta

Petrova, “A Postcommunist Transition in Two Acts,” in Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World, ed. Valerie Bunce, Michael McFaul, and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 107-133. 26. Holger C. Wolf, Atish R. Gosh, Helge Berger, and Anne-Marie Gulde, Currency Boards in Retrospect and Prospect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 2008). For the Bulgarian case see pages 173-181. 27. Currency boards are usually temporary, since they limit the ability of the government to devalue, for instance. In Bulgaria’s case, however, it is assumed that the currency board will continue to operate until Bulgaria joins the European Monetary Union. 28. Kozludy was eventually closed, but as late as 2010 the EU was still providing substantial sums for the rehabilitation of the nuclear facility. 29. From the sea change in Bulgarian politics in 1997 to accession to the European Union in 2007 there was a curious disjuncture between Bulgaria’s progress and public perceptions. For example, between 1997 and 2003 per capita income improved significantly every year as did Transparency International’s measure of corruption (i.e., less corruption). Nevertheless, at the same time the number of persons believing the situation in Bulgaria was improving dropped in half from about 40 percent to about 20 percent. See Georgy Ganev, “Where Has Marxism Gone? Gauging the Impact of Alternative Ideas in Transition Bulgaria,” East European Politics and Societies 19, no. 3 (2005): 443-462. 30. Simeon’s not very Bulgarian sounding name derives from him being the grandson of the first king of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was installed in 1887 shortly after Bulgaria's independence from the Ottoman Empire. Simeon became king, or “tsar” in the Bulgarian usage, in 1943 but fled into exile in 1951.

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 339 The volatility and impermanence of Bulgarian political life is suggested by the fact that not only did Simeon’s party lose the next election in 2005 to a coalition led by the BSP, but in the 2009 election it did not even get the 4 percent vote necessary to enter parliament (causing Simeon to resign as party head). The 2009 election was won by yet another new reforming party led by Boyko Borisov, mayor of Sofia, called Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (Grazhdani za Evropeisko Razvitie na Bulgariya—GERB). 31. Crampton, Bulgaria, 444. 32. For a brief but brilliant and well informed overview of the decade see Ivo Banac, “What Happened in the Balkans (or Rather ex-Yugoslavia)?,” East European Politics and Society 33, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 461-478. For a much more detailed review of the entire Balkans, including the former Yugoslavia, see Bideleux and Jeffries, The Balkans. Mieczystaw P. Boduszynhski, Regime Change in the Yugoslav Successor States:

Divergent Paths toward a New Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) provides a useful analytical discussion of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia. 33. For a thorough examination of the policies of the EU and other Western agencies toward the Western Balkans see Steven Blockmans, Tough Love: The European Union’s Relations with the Western Balkans (The Hague: T-M-C Asser Press, 2007). Blockmans argues that only a strict EU policy of conditionality will work in bringing these countries to democracy. 34. Banac, “What Happened in the Balkans?,” 461. 35. On the Serbian charge, see Benjamin Rusek and Charles Ingrao, “The ‘Mortar Massacres: A Controversy Revisited,’ Nationalities Papers 34, no. 2 (December 1994): 837-838. UNSC 757/1992, dated 30 May 1992, was only one of more than 150 resolutions and statements on Bosnian questions over the years. 36. On MiloSevic’s involvement in fomenting the war in Bosnia, see Josip Glaurdic, “Inside the Serbian War Machine: The MiloSevic Telephone Intercepts, 1991-1992,” East European Politics and Society 23, no. 1 (February 2009): 86-104. In 2010 Serbian police uncovered a cache of some 3,500 documents kept by General Ratko Mladic in which the Serbian government’s role in fomenting and directing Serbian operations in Bosnia became even clearer (New York Times, July 10, 2010). 37. Marko Attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed (London: Saqi Books, 2004). 38. Chuck Sudetic puts a human face on the tragedies of the war in Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

39. Isabelle Wesselingh and Arnaud Vaulerin, Raw Memory: Prijedor, Laboratory of Ethnic Cleansing (London: Saqi Books, 2005), provide firsthand accounts of the outrages in these camps.

40. The formal name of the tribunal is: “International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Law Committed on the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991.” Over the course of its life it indicted 161 individuals. See its excellent Web site icty.org. Marko Attila Hoare argues that the court was primarily devised as a fig leaf to cover the unwillingness of the Atlantic

powers to become involved in Balkan affairs. See his “Bosnia-Hercegovina and International Justice: Past Failures and Future Solutions,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 2 (May 2010): 191-205. 41. Charles R. Shrader, on the other hand, puts the blame for starting the war on Bosniak

migrations and incursions into Croatian territories. See his detailed study, The

340 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia: A Military History (College Station: Texas A &M Press, 2003).

42. “Conditions [in Mostar, besieged by Croatian forces,] may make those in Sarajevo look like easy living,” reported David B. Ottoway in the Washington Post. “Here, there is no street market to buy even a loaf of bread or cigarettes.” Ottoway’s article was entitled “Mostar’s Muslims ‘Living Like Rats.” Quoted by Peter Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 4. 43. Charles Ingrao, “Safe Areas,” in Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars’

Initiative, ed. Charles Ingrao and Thomas Emmert (Washington, D.C., and West Lafayette, Ind.: United States Institute of Peace Press and Purdue University Press, 2009), 208. 44. Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 453-454. 45. David Rohde, End Game: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

46. Fora detailed account of the negotiations that led to the Dayton Accords, see Richard Holbrook, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998). 47. The number of deaths caused by the war remains controversial, with figures between 200,000 and 240,000 remaining common. However, an independent agency created under Norwegian auspices has attempted to identify by name every person killed during the Bosnian war. In 2007 this Research and Documentation Centre released its Bosnian Book of the Dead, identifying 97,027 victims, almost half of whom died in the period May through August 1992; 65 percent of victims were Bosniaks, 25 percent Serbs, and 10 percent Croats. The Centre believes that this is a minimum figure, and that perhaps as many as 10,000 further dead may be unaccounted for. In 2005 the Demographic Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY estimated that the Bosnian War was responsible for 102,622 deaths (Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “WarRelated Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population 21, no. 2/3, [June 2005]: 187-215.)

48. By 2010 the number of international troops had dropped to about 2,500. IFOR lasted only one year and was replaced by a Stabilization Force (SFOR), which in turn was replaced in 2004 bya European Union Force (EUFOR), which transferred enforcement of the military aspects of the Dayton Accords from NATO to EU administration. 49. Djindji¢ represented Zajedno (Together), a new coalition of parties including Vuk Draskovic’s Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), Vesna Pesic’s Civic Alliance of Serbia (GSS), and the older opposition group, the Serbia Democratic Movement (DEPOS). 50. An agreement was reached in 1996 for Albanian children to return to the public school system, but it had little effect. 51. U.S. Department of State, “Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo, Executive Summary, May 1999, accessed July 7, 2010, http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/ rpt_9905_ethnic_ksvo_exec.html 52. Stephen T. Hosmer, Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corp, 2001). 53. For a critical assessment of Kostunica as “SeSelj in a frock coat” see Norman Cigar, Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s Future (London: Saqi Books, 2001). The Segelj phrase is actually that of Sonja Biserko in her introduction.

CHAPTER 9 « Southeastern Europe 341 54. For detailed coverage of MiloSevic’s trial, see Judith Armatta, Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

55. See the Kosovo Standards Implementation Plan, 31 March 2004, accessed July 15, 2010, http://www.unmikonline.org/pub/misc/ksip_eng.pdf 56. Franjo Tudjman mused about this possibility during the NATO bombing, holding that Serbia should get the northern part of Kosova, while the Southern part should be merged with Albania. This despite the fact that he saw the Albanians as the common enemy of Serbia and Croatia (Mirna Solic, “Croatia: The Tudjman Tapes,” Transitions Online, 10 July 2000). Accessed April 7, 2011. http://www.tol/org/client/article/8402.

57. In 2009 the European Union also introduced 2,000 advisors (EULEX) to assist Kosova with police and justice issues. 58. Grigore Pop-Eleches argues that “the prospects for democratization...were significantly better in countries with favorable legacies” and that despite its authoritarian

start under Tudjman, Croatia reverted to form after his death, making significant progress in the first decade of the twenty-first century (“Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change,” The Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 [November 2007]: 909).

59. James J. Sadkovich, “Who was Franjo Tudjman?” East European Politics and Society 26, no. 4 (2006), 729-739. For a defense of Tudjman, see James J. Sadkovich, “Franjo Tudjman: An Intellectual in Politics,” in Croatia Since Independence: War, Politics, Society, Foreign Relations, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet, Konrad Clewing, and Reneo Lukic¢ (Munich, Germany: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008), 59-85. 60. Boduszynski, Regime Change, 74-114. 61. Ivo Bicani¢, quoted by Boduszynski, Regime Change, 110. 62. Bideleau and Jeffries, The Balkans, 220. 63. For a discussion of the Croatian economy under Tudjman, as well as of social issues at the time, see William Bartlett, Croatia: Between Europe and the Balkans (London: Routledge, 2003), chapters 4 and 5.

64. EU Commission, “Opinion on Croatia’s Application for Membership of the European Union,” April 20, 2004 (Brussels: COM[2004] 257 Final): 120121, accessed July 21, 2010. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ. do?uri=Com:2004:0257:FIN:EN:PDF

65. Carla del Ponte, with Chuck Sudetic, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity (New York: Other Press, 2009), 270-271. 66. The reasons for Sanader’s resignation remain unclear, but they may be related to his arrest late in 2010 for corruption while in office (Tihomir Luza, “Croatia’s Scalp Collector,” Transitions on Line, 16 December 2010), accessed April 6, 2010. http:// www.tol.org/client/article/22036. 67. For details on those responsible for Djindjic’s assassination, see Tihomir Loza, “The Rest of the Story,” Transitions Online, 17 March 2011, accessed April 7, 2011. http:// www.tol.org/client/article/22254. 68. Obrad Kesi¢, “An Airplane with Eighteen Pilots,” in Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society Under Milosevié and After ed. Sabrina P. Ramet and Vjeran Pavlakovic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 95-121. 69. The vote was 55.5 percent for independence and 44.5 against, but the EU had decreed that the referendum had to pass by 55 percent of the vote, which it barely achieved.

342 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 70. Late in 2010 Djukanovi¢ stepped down under pressure for allegedly corrupt practices, perhaps to clear the way for Montenegro to achieve candidate status from the EU. 71. Boduszynsky, Regime Change, 166, 169. 72. For an excellent analysis of the ingredients leading to this outbreak of “almost war,” see Robert Hislope, “Between a Bad Peace and a Good War: Insights and Lessons from the Almost-war in Macedonia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 1 (January 2003): 129-151. See also Armend Reka, “The Ohrid Agreement: The Travails of Interethnic Relations in Macedonia,” Human Rights Review 9 (2008): 55-69. 73. Miranda Vickers and James Pettifer, Albania: From Anarchy to a Balkan Identity (London: Hurst & Company, 1997), 33-54.

74. Chris Jarvis, “The Rise and Fall of the Pyramid Schemes in Albania,” IMF Staff papers, 2000 47, no. 1, 1-29.

75. On this crisis and the course of Albanian politics until 2005, see James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers, The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 76. Mirela Bogdaniand John Loughlin, Albania and the European Union: The Tumultuous Journey Towards Integration and Accession (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).

77. Fatos Nano, on the other hand, was pro-Serbian and pro-Greek while he was in power, perhaps because of his political base in Southern Albania, or perhaps because if Berisha was for something, Nano was against it. 78. EU progress report of October 14, 2009, accessed August 14, 2010, http://europa.eu/ rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/09/450&format=HTML&aged=0 &language=EN&guiLanguage=en 79. For a discussion of the Albanian public’s loss of faith in politics, see Blendi Kajsiu, “Down with Politics! The Crisis of Representation in Post-Communist Albania,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 2 (May 2010): 229-253.

EPILOGUE

a,

Pluralism, the New Reality

. the twentieth century East European nations found it difficult to follow paths of their own choosing. Apparently released from the grasp of ancient empires by World War I, all the new countries of the region became participants, willing or unwilling, in Adolf Hitler’s disastrous experiment in antirationalism. Escaping that monster gravely wounded, they turned only to find themselves caught up in Joseph Stalin’s equally disastrous foray into hyperrationalism. Because of its unfortunate geographical location between Russia and Germany, Eastern Europe became the primary field on which these two immense twentieth-century experiments were conducted, first during the great European civil war of 1914-1945, and then in the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the cold war. But 1945 marked the end of an era in which raw power was the dominant ingredient in European international relations. The postwar division of Europe into two halves freed the western half to construct an alliance of democratic states whose interaction was not based on warfare but on negotiation and accommodation. As the cold war recedes, it is becoming increasingly clear that it will be seen in the long run as relatively short-lived aberration from the general trend of postwar European development, which is the elaboration of economic and political pluralism through the maturing of the European Union. This is especially so if we consider that the collapses of 1989 and 1991 took place in an increasingly globalized world pulled together by the information revolution. The inability of communist regimes to cope with the pressures of these two processes was an important factor in their failure. As Amartya Sen put it, “The Berlin Wall ... was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future.”! The collapse of communism broke that roadblock. At the same time the end of the cold war constituted the end of traditional colonialism. “It is easy,’ writes Odd Arne Westad, “to see the Cold War in the [Southern hemisphere] as a continuation of European colonial intervention and of European attempts at controlling Third World peoples.”? The southern hemisphere remains a subject of European

343

344 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

and American interest. But that interest is now expressed through transnational entities such as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and literally thousands of NGOs rather than directly by the United States and the Soviet Union. In other words, the long-term significance of the cold war era may well not be the overwhelming struggle between two powerful rivals that almost everyone in the United States and the Soviet Union thought it was. In many parts of the world it may be remembered as the final phase of imperialism left over from the 19th century, an anachronism, even a temporary impediment to the powerful wave of transnational interactions that characterizes the contemporary world. Even in Europe itself, the cold war, especially its early years, may come to be seen as the environment that made it possible to create a political and economic structure consistent with an integrated world, a structure that abolished war as an instrument of public policy. In all these larger scenarios, 1989 is not so much a revolutionary moment but rather an enabling moment that cleared the deck for more fundamental processes to proceed toward whatever lies ahead. And yet, the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism were thrilling events that changed the shape of Europe and transformed the structure of international relations. The consequences for people on the ground in Eastern Europe were profound. However dull the public face of “real existing socialism,” it was at least a life one had become accustomed to. After 1989, everything changed.

For the young and energetic, hitherto unimagined opportunities opened for starting a new business, getting an education, working abroad, and pushing the envelope. For well-placed Communists the chance to become truly wealthy was almost irresistible. On the other hand, for many the post-Communist era, especially at first, was extremely difficult. Not only were the first few years economically disastrous, but many of the customary practices of ordinary life, such as the value of time, gender relations, the nature of public discourse, and the job environment, changed. This book uses the term “the revolutions of 1989,” even though (outside of the former Yugoslavia) these events did not have the characteristics of the great European revolutions (no beheadings, no civil wars, and no thermidorian reaction). But in terms of their impact on the daily lives of ordinary citizens, the term “revolution” is justified. The shape of international relations changed too. It was common during the cold war to speak of two superpowers, but after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only one was left, the United States. One may debate whether that monopoly position has been used wisely, but there is no doubt that for a generation the United States perceived itself as the dominant military, economic, and political power on earth. The change in Europe itself was dramatic too. Instead of a split continent, Europe is now mostly united into one economically potent network of democratic powers. Germany is contained, and Russia has become a peripheral neighbor. The impetus for these great events came from the commitment of a few

reform-minded elites, both inside and outside of government, and from the spontaneous acts of hundreds of thousands of East European citizens. The great

EPILOGUE « Pluralism, the New Reality 345

events of 1989 were indigenous to Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, many Americans

still give President Ronald Reagan the credit for communism’s collapse. They know the American president called the Soviet Union the evil empire, began the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or Star Wars, and in 1987, placing himself photogenically in front of the Berlin Wall, said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Since in fact the Wall did come down two years later, it seemed that Reagan had magically done it. Today, however, it is clear that whereas Reagan developed a close relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev and deserves credit for going against his advisors in grasping Gorbachev's new direction, he had only slightly more to do with the collapse of communism than any of the other American presidents who followed the policy of containment.* Related to the Reagan myth is the view that the American military buildup Reagan oversaw, especially SDI, is what pushed the Soviet Union over the edge economically. When the Soviet military realized it could not compete with the

United States technologically, the argument goes, it tried to reform and the Soviet economy collapsed. It is true that Soviet leaders understood their economy needed repair and some generals were concerned about Star Wars. But the Soviet economy did not collapse because of its inefficiencies, which were many. It collapsed because Gorbachev's political reforms left the Communist party rudderless. Once the party lost its ability to control the economy chaos ensued. Other weaknesses infected the system as well, such as inflation, the drop in oil prices, and the breakdown of transportation that made it difficult to get crops to urban areas. So yes, the Soviet economy collapsed, but it did so because of the political changes Gorbachev introduced not because it was fated to collapse, or because it was socialist, or because SDI added that extra straw that broke its back. These two ideas, that Reagan won the cold war and that military spending brought down the Soviet Union, are examples of stereotyped thinking that relies

on long-standing assumptions about the nature of communism rather than on actual data. Puzzlement over the question of why Gorbachev did not intervene militarily when it appeared Soviet control of Eastern Europe was weakening is a form of this kind of thinking The will to use force had been declining in the Soviet Union since the time of Stalin. In 1945 the Red Army marched roughshod through Eastern Europe killing and raping as it won World War II. Then in 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, Khrushchev sent the Red Army in shooting. The next time East Europeans seemed to be getting out of line, however, during the Prague Spring in 1968, Brezhnev did not send in the Red Army, but rather a coalition of his Warsaw Pact allies, this time not shooting. Then in 1980 and 1981, when confronted by Solidarity, the Soviets did not intervene physically at all. For a year before General Jaruzelski imposed martial law the Soviets encouraged, berated, and pleaded, but when push came to shove in December 1981 and Jaruzelski asked the politburo if it intended to back up his imposition of martial law with troops if needed, the Soviet leaders explicitly said no. The one place the Soviet Union intervened militarily in its last fifteen years of existence, Afghanistan, turned out to be a disaster. If conservative leaders like

346 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Suslov, and Andrei Gromyko would not back Jaruzelski in 1981, and if the Soviet Union had just withdrawn its last troops from a disastrous and demoralizing war, who in 1989 would have been willing to use force to put down the demonstrations in Leipzig or elsewhere? Perhaps more important than this tendency, however, was Gorbachev's per-

sonal aversion to violence and his commitment to the creation of a new post cold war Europe. He knew the East European regimes needed reform. By 1987 he and his advisors even realized that the East European satellites were a burden rather than an asset. So when in the spring of 1989 the Hungarians told him they were taking down their border defenses, he did not react. Rather than panic at Solidarity’s victory in the June 1989 election, he used the occasion of a speech to the European Parliament one month later to outline what he meant by acommon European home: collective security rather than two blocs, economic integration

from the Urals to the Atlantic, protection of the environment, and respect for human rights.° And, just before the fall of the Berlin wall, he pointedly told the East German regime that “life punishes those who come too late.” Western indifference and the rapid fire series of events that led to the unification of Germany scuttled Gorbachev's hopes, but while they were alive military intervention in Eastern Europe would have completely undermined Soviet intentions. This is why Svetlana Savranskaya has been able to go through all of the Soviet politburo records from 1985 through 1991 and not find a single reference to the possibility of using force in Eastern Europe.’

A final example of stereotyped thinking about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is that the Communist era consisted of uniformly bleak years of repression and misery. Of course it is true, especially when we are speaking of the early Stalinist experience or the later Ceausescu years, that there were some very difficult times, and it is true that the East European regimes had lost legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens. Why then is one of the primary emotions about the Communist period in today’s Eastern Europe nostalgia?’ Wistful remembering of an allegedly golden past, one’s youth, for example, is not uncommon throughout the world. But some have interpreted post-Communist nostalgia negatively,

on the theory that it is bizarre to recall the evils of communism benignly. It is well to keep in mind, therefore, that most people lived ordinary lives under communism, falling in love, competing for promotions, dealing with teenagers, complaining, going on vacation, all the rest. For most, the thing that is remembered positively is not the long lines, the shortages, the dull rhetoric, or the forced parades, but rather the stability of ordinary life. In Communist times everyone had a job, once you got an apartment you kept it, and the state was symbolically organized around the dignity of workers. Under pluralism that kind of stability is gone. Workers are no longer the heroes of society, jobs are not guaranteed, public life seems to consist of one crisis after another, and young people emigrate to the West instead of staying at home. Perhaps it is not so strange that some feel a sense of loss at the success of pluralism. Some East Europeans even go beyond nostalgia, yearning for the unpleasant times of the 1930s. Xenophobic and racist

EPILOGUE « Pluralism, the New Reality 347

parties such as Ataka in Bulgaria, 1389 in Serbia, and Jobbik in Hungary that hearken back to those bad old days have ridden their hateful rhetoric to modest electoral success.

As these outbursts of nostalgia and even rage suggest, pluralism has not been an unmitigated success. For example, the European Union has not been able to use its conditionality strategy successfully in the Western Balkans, with the exception of Croatia. After twenty years of warfare, international stewardship, moral pressure, and marathon negotiations, it remains unclear if and when places like Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, Kosova and Macedonia will be able to join the European Union. Neither has the European Union been able to engender the emotional support that nation states enjoy, nor probably will it. This reality derives from the fact that the EU is more a legal process than it is a society or a culture. It is difficult to generate warmth toward the EU’s often technical and bureaucratic arrangements. This not surprising, since the underlying strength of pluralism is that it is a process, not an ideology. It does not have a transcendent goal, like hyperrationalism did. It does not promise to bring the millennium. It only seeks to find a methodology for permitting human beings of varying backgrounds and opinions to function together in their own and in society's interests. The guts of the EU today are the acquis communautaire, the mind boggling (and not very warmth inducing) collection of rules and regulations that are the concrete realization of how Europeans have translated the processes of pluralism into reality. Local styles of pluralism often do not look too attractive either. After making it into the European Union Romania and Bulgaria have found it difficult to transform their systems of jurisprudence to European standards and seem to be buffeted by an unusual amount of corruption; Slovaks have experienced a burst of unpleasant anti-Hungarian nationalism; the president of the Czech Republic seems more interested in denying global warming than in providing leadership for his country; and Hungary’s ruling party lied about its budget to get elected, causing riots when the truth came out. And so it goes. What criticisms of these distressing realities miss is that bumps in the road are just what one would expect in pluralist societies. Authoritarian states hide

their weaknesses under a smooth surface of unity, efficiency, and strength. Pluralist societies hide their strengths and present a surface of disarray, confusion, and weakness. In pluralist societies all problems are fair game for public debate, whereas in authoritarian societies no public debate concerns real issues. For this reason, nothing ever gets solved in authoritarian states. Problems continue to fester, causing structural damage without hope of repair. Pluralist societies, whatever their difficulties, do in fact change. Once they solve, or at least ameliorate, a problem, the formerly highly visible dysfunction disappears and the solution becomes an invisible strength. Many East Europeans did not realize this in 1989. For them the term democracy was an empty concept, a positive symbol of the hope for a better life they associated with “Europe,” not a lived reality. Most did not grasp that democracy is a form of political warfare often characterized

348 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

by pettiness, obstructionism, ambition, and greed. Also not well understood was that Western democracies did not come to a pluralist political solution through a process of calm deliberation, nor does every European democracy run like a well-oiled machine. From the eighteenth century to the present pluralist governments have been marked by posturing, venality, “specious men,” and wrong turns, as they still are.

And very few people, then or now, grasp how long it takes to establish a pluralist tradition. The British invented the principles of liberal government, the politics of accommodation that insists that the opposition play a central role in governance. Traditionally, the events that ushered in that innovation have been considered to be the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In fact, however, the term loyal opposition did not come into use for the

first time in Britain until 1826 (even then it was a heavily ironic term used in derision), and many British historians argue that the principles today associated with liberal government did not receive their first practical form in parliament until the Great Reform Act of 1832. Americans celebrate 1776 as the date of the American Revolution, but two of the most important issues raised by that revolution, slavery in a land where “all men are created equal” and the rights of states in a federal system, were not resolved until half a million men died in a huge civil

war almost ninety years later. Francois Furet entitles his most comprehensive book on the French Revolution La Révolution: de Turgot a Jules Ferry, 1770-1880 because he believes that not until the creation of the Third Republic in 1875 were

the principles of the French Revolution firmly established in French political structures, once again almost ninety years after the initial events. The tendency to criticize East European politics in terms of an unrealistic and idealized version of democracy rather than in terms of its actualities is repeated in the economic sphere. Apologists for capitalism are partial to Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant ethic. The successful capitalist works hard, saves money, honors contracts, and exercises stewardship. This positive picture of the capitalist is true as far as it goes, but there is another side of the coin, less stressed but also true. Capitalists were also often pirates, slave traders, and speculators who had little compunction about working other human beings to death, subjugating the weak, and cheating the public. The remarkable thing is not that such people exist—they still do and they always will—but that stable pluralist societies were constructed in spite of them. To find corruption in Eastern Europe today is not surprising. The surprise would have been if it had prevented the emergence of pluralist societies there. And pluralist societies have emerged. In 2010, Freedom House, which ranks all the countries in the world on the basis of their political rights and their civil liberties, ranked all the countries of Eastern Europe “free” with the exception of Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Kosova, which are ranked “partly free.” 9 Every country holds regular elections, which are free and mostly fair. All countries have at least two strong political parties that compete in the elections, and every country has experienced more than one change of regime. Democracy in East Central Europe is at about the same level as in other countries that are understood to be

EPILOGUE « Pluralism, the New Reality 349

democratic.!° There also seems to be a close relationship between how democratic

a country is with how privatized it is, or how structurally reformed it is. The better a country’s democratic ranking by Freedom House, the higher the World Bank ranks it in terms of privatization or structural reform in the economy." Anders Aslund even argues that many countries of Eastern Europe proved sufficiently resilient in the world economic downturn of 2008 to have emerged actually stronger than they were.!2 One source of pluralism’s success is that it has freed up creative energies in the region. One evidence among many is the proliferation of higher educational facilities. Not only do as high a percentage of East European young people attend college as in other developed countries, but they attend a wide range of private business, economics, touristic, and other colleges that have emerged to meet the demand for advanced training. This market is chaotic, many of the new schools have failed, and issues of textbook availability and low professors’ salaries limit progress, but the enthusiasm for new forms of education suggest that one of the promises of pluralism is being realized: unleashing the energy of society’s most creative individuals. If human resources are a basic building block of successful modern societies, Eastern Europe is on the right path. Just because a country is a member of the pluralist European Union does not guarantee it economic growth, internal stability, or immunity from stupid mistakes. The Greek financial crisis of 2009 and 2010, or the almost suicidal tendency of Belgian politics, are evidence of that. But membership does guarantee one overwhelmingly good thing: freedom from actual warfare. This brute fact of the European Union trumps all: since 1945 there have been no continent-wide wars in Europe and there is little prospect that there will be any in the foreseeable future. Young people have come to take this condition for granted, as something of a right, the normal situation. They thus find it easy, even clever, to emphasize pluralism’s faults, which come readily to mind. But when we consider the

fifty million dead, the phenomenal destruction of property, and the crushing of human aspirations caused by the great European civil war of 1914 to 1945, as well as the stultifying impact of forty years of communism, one may be permitted to take these faults with a grain of salt. It is peace that makes it possible to experience the varieties of life that characterize the newly pluralistic societies of Eastern Europe.

NOTES 1. As quoted by Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, updated and expanded (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 53. 2. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. Mary Elise Sarotte cogently objects that it is “an oversimplification to consider the Cold War to be merely a coda to colonialism,” but I would argue that one of the significant effects of the end of the cold war was the end of an old fashioned kind of colonialism (1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe |Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009], 13).

350 THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN 3. Vladimir Tismaneanu argues that the revolutions of 1989 were of world historical significance because of the positive principles of civil society, tolerance, and democracy they represented (Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Revolutions of 1989: Causes, Meanings, Consequences,’ Contemporary European History 18, no. 3 [2009]: 271288). For an argument that civil society had nothing to do with the revolutions of 1989, except perhaps in Poland, see Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New

York: Modern Library, 2009). Mary Elise Sarotte considers 1989 one of the “truly major turning points in modern history,” which is especially true if we add the word “European” before “history” (Sarotte, 1989, 284). Timothy Garton Ash admires 1989 as Europe's best year, the only time in European history that the people came onto the streets and overthrew oppressive regimes (“1989!” New York Review of Books 57, no. 17 [November 5, 2009]: 8).

4. For the lengthy internal discussions leading to the utterance of that famous phrase, see James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Viking, 2009), 117-215.

5. A powerful demonstration of this point is Thomas Blanton, “U.S. Policy and the Revolutions of 1989,” in Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press), 49-98. See also Jack Matlock, Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led American Astray—And How to Return to Reality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). 6. Masterpieces of History, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya et al., Doc. 73, 492-496. 7. Svetlana Savranskaya, “The Logic of 1989: The Soviet Peaceful Withdrawal from Eastern Europe,” in Masterpieces of History, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya et al., 1-47. 8. Post Communist Nostalgia, ed. Maria Todorova (New York: Bergahn Books, 2010). See also Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation, ed. Maria Todorova (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2010); Past for the Eyes: East European

Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989, ed. Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2008); Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies In Post-Communist Eastern Europe, ed. Sorin Antohi, Balazs Trencsényi and Péter Apor (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2007); Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, ed. Michael Kopocek (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2008); and (Re)Writing History—Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, ed. Ulf Brunnbauer (Minster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2004).

9. See freedomhouse.org. 10. Andrew Roberts, The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reforms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

11. See the figures in Anders Aslund, How Capitalism was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170, 177, 216.

12. Anders Aslund: The Last Shall be the First: The East European Financial Crisis (Washington, D.C.: The Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010).

——,

Index

Abgrenzung, 72 Alliance of Young Democrats, 114, 161, 275, 276

Abortion All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions, 140, 147 Germany's unification impact on, 251, Almond, Mark, 65

266n25 Alpha Group, 258

as human rights issue, 294-95, American Revolution, 348

303n67-n68 Andrejevich, Milan, 221

in Romania, 68, 89n41, 89n44, 184 Andropov, Yuri, 345-46

in Slovenia, 287 Antall, Jozsef, 160, 274-76

Academy of Sciences, 76 Anti-Fascist Council, 78

Adenauer, Konrad, 70, 259, 260, 274 Antipoliticians Afghanistan, 115, 275, 345-46 Czechoslovakia’s, 25-28, 51n61, 175-76

Aganbegyan, Abel, 107, 114 GDR, 164-65

Agriculture Poland’s, 23-25, 29, 36 Albania’s peasant worker, 334-35 Romania's, 187-88

CAP, 261, 292 Antirationalism, 3-4, 343

collectivized, 60, 63, 65, 87n5, 97-98, 99, Anti-Semitism, 297

118n9 in Hungary, 275-76

cooperatives, 100 in Poland, 18, 48n18, 141

Czechoslovakia’s, 77 in Romania, 309, 311 Ahtisaari, Martti, 326 Antonescu, Ion, 311

Zhivkov’s policies on, 171 Anti-Western sentiment, 330

Albania, 78-79. See also Kosovar Albanians Aslund, Anders, 349

agriculture in, 334-35 Atanasov, Georgi, 170, 173

atheism enforced in, 78 Atheism, 78

economy of, 335 Austria, 157

1990s, 334-36 Austro-Hungarian state, 204-5, 281

Albanians in Macedonia, 332-34

Albright, Madeleine, 283 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 72, 164 Aleksandar of Serbia, 205, 206 Bacon, Walter, 65 Alima-Gerber Foods privatization, 273 Badinter, Robert, 233

Alliance 90, 251 Badinter Commission, 233-34, 235 Alliance for Germany, 248 Bahro, Rudolf, 73-74

Alliance of Free Democrats, 106, 113-14, 158, Baker, James A., 233, 250-51, 257

161, 275, 277 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 270, 271, 272

351

352 INDEX Balkans, 306. See also individual states Bulgaria, 59-62, 168-74, 313-17, 338n29. See

Serbia’s importance to, 331 also Economy

Western, 317-18, 334, 347 demographic decline in, 317

Baltic republics, 252 detention camps in, 60-61, 87n7 Banac, Ivo, 208 environmental activism in, 171, 196n56 Baranczak, Stanistaw, 29 EU entry of, 310, 315, 316

Basescu, Traian, 311, 312 perestroika in, 172

Basic Law of 1949, 248 post-communist leadership of, 313 Basic Organizations of Associated Labor, Romania and, 58-59

210, 213 social stratification in, 61-62 Basket Three, 26 strikes in, 62, 170 Basic Treaty, 71 state plundered in, 313-14

Battle Turks’ assimilation in, 169-70 of crosses, 129 Zhivkov, T., fall of, 168-74

over holidays, 129 Zhivkov, T., period in, 59-62, 87n5, 168-74

Bauman, Zygmunt, 18, 47n17 Bulgarian Constitutional Court, 315

Belgium, 349 Bulgarian Socialist party, 313, 314 Belgrade University, 17-18 Bush, George H. W., 137, 148, 162, 233, 245 Bence, Gyorgy, 105 Bosnia inaction of, 319 Benda, Vaclav, 26-27, 177 Kohl and, 250 Bene§, Edvard, 278 USSR relations with, 265n10

Berend, Ivan, 103 Bydgoszcz, 42, 43 Berisha, Sali, 335-36

Berlin wall, 70 CAP. See Common Agricultural Policy collapse of, 162-67, 188 Capitalism, 5-6, 10n7

Beszél6, 105-6, 108, 120n45 idealized view of, 348 B’ilak, Vasil, 76-77. See also Husak/B’ilak Caritas, 308

regime Carrington, Peter Lord, 233

Binder, David, 245 Carter, Jimmy, 50n56, 55n127, 187

Bird, Zoltan, 195 Catholic church

Blandiana, Anna, 187 Czechoslovakia activism of, 177-79 Boduszynski, Mieczystaw, 327 in Poland, 33-36, 125, 133-36

Bogomoloy, Oleg, 114 Solidarity support from, 136

Borba, 213 Catholic Intellectual Clubs, 136

Bosnia Caucasus region, USSR, 253

division of, 322 Ceausescu, Elena, 65, 183, 190-91

war in, 234-35, 318-22, 324 Ceausescu, Ilie, 184 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 231 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 59, 62-69, 87n4, 307

Bourgeoisification, 102 execution of, 191, 202n135

Brandt, Willy, 248 Gorbachev and, 95, 115, 185

Brezhnev, Leonid, 17, 76, 79, 177 historical narrative control of, 66

Gorbachev and, 79-82, 115 last days of, 183-93, 202n135 Prague Spring actions of, 345 resettlement plan, 186, 188 reform and hyperrationalism, 8-9 secret police under, 67 Walesa’s release and, 130, 151n22 self-promotion of, 65, 185-86

Brezhnev Doctrine, 9, 86 Ceausescu, Nicu, 192

Gorbachev repudiation of, 115 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 43, 84, 321

Brno, 181, 183, 199n107 Centrally planned economies, 6, 10n17, 60,

Brus, Wtodzimierz, 140 102-3. See also Economy; Privatization BSP (Bulgarska sotsialisticheska partiya). See GDR, 72-73, 163, 248-50, 266n18

Bulgarian Socialist party transformation of, 272

Budapest School, 104, 106, 119n38 Central Trade Union Council, 20 Bujak, Zbigniew, 126, 127, 134, 135, 144 Charter 77, 50n56, 77, 105

Bulatovic, Momir, 227, 331 Helsinki Accords and, 25-27

Index 353

membership, 175 Commonwealth of Independent States

velvet revolution and, 176-78, 180 (CIS), 258

Chavez, Hugo, 5 Communism, 22. See also specific countries;

Chernenko, Konstantin, 79 specific republics Chernobyl, 82-83, 138 decentralizing of, 84, 93n102 Chernyaev, Anatoly S., 245 nostalgia for, 346-47

Chervenko, Vilko, 58 pluralism compared to, 346-47

Chile, 304n75 stability of, 346-47

Chojecki, Mirek, 30 state power in, 6, 10n12

Christian Democratic Union, 248 unemployment under, 296 Chronicle of Current Events, 29 Computer industry, Bulgaria’s, 168-69, 196n47 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Conference on Security and Cooperation in

Ciorbea, Victor, 309, 310 Europe (CSCE), 170, 180, 187, 247-48

Circles of Social Resistance, 128 Congress of People’s Deputies, 83, 115, 123 CIS. See Commonwealth of Independent Yeltsin’s election to, 256

States Constantinescu, Emil, 309

Civic Democratic party, 280 Cooperatives, agricultural, 100. See also

Civic Forum, 278, 280 Collectivization

Civil society, Poland 1970s, 27-33 Corfu Agreement, 204, 205

Civil war Cornea, Doina, 187

EU roots in, 259-60 Corruption, political

European, 259 in Bulgaria, 168, 316

Macedonian, 318 in Czech Republic, 284

Yugoslavia, 203, 224, 228-32 in Germany, 244

Clinton, Bill, 319 in Poland, 272

Club for the Support of Perestroika and in Romania, 311-12

Glasnost, 172 Cosic¢, Dobrica, 216 Assistance (CMEA), 63, 72, 84, 96, 139, 168, 290 Coal miners Cozma, Miron, 307 Kosova’s, 219 Crampton, Richard, 314 CMEA. See Council for Mutual Economic Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

Poland’s, 46, 56n137, 139 Croatia, 33, 205, 206, 226, 237n10

Romania's, 185, 307-8 EU and, 233-34, 242n82, 328-29

USSR, 255 independence of, 233-34, 236n7, 242n82 cold war era, 343-45, 349n2 1990s, 326-30 Albania during, 78 Serbian war, 229-32 NATO and, 288 simulated democracy of, 327 perception of, 344 Slovenia and, 220-23 stereotyped thinking about, 344-45 Ustashe in, 206-7, 229 Collectivization Croatian Defense Council, 319-20 in Bulgaria, 60, 87n5 Croatian Democratic Union, 222-23,

in Hungary, 97-98, 99, 118n9 327-28

in Romania, 63, 65, 87n5 Croatian Peasant Party, 205 Committee for Historical Justice, 112 Crosses, battle over, 129 Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly CSCE. See Conference on Security and

Persecuted, 176-77 Cooperation in Europe

Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR), Csepel Steel Trust, 103

29-33, 52n70, 52n84, 53n93 Csoori, Sandor, 106

headquarters, 37, 53n102 Csurka, Istvan, 275-76 Kuron’s activism in, 37, 53n102 Cult of personality, 65, 88n26

Solidarity as child of, 39 Currency debate, 264 Szczecin strikes, 19-20, 22, 39, 40, Cyprus, 291

54n111 Cyrankiewicz, Jozef, 48n23

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 261, 292 Czech lands, 281-82

354 INDEX Czechoslovakia. See also Charter 77;Economy; | Democratic Party for Macedonian National

Prague Spring Unity, 227

agriculture in, 77 Demonstrations. See also General strike; antipoliticians in, 25-28, 51n61, 175-76 Protest; Strikes

battle over holidays, 180 GDR 19839, 165

Catholic activism in, 177-79 in Hungary, 111-12, 116-17

civilized persecution in, 76-77 Leipzig, 166

communist party in, 17 against MiloSevic, 323 cultural revival in, 16 Romania’s 1989, 189-91 division of, 278-86 Ruse air pollution, 171, 196n56 federal state status, 75 in USSR republics, 253 general strike of 1989, 182-83, 199n107 Demszky, Gabor, 106

1980s, 178 Detention camps, 60-61, 87n7, 318 perestroika, 179 Dimovski, Boris, 61, 172 normalization in, 75-78 Dimitrova, Blaga, 172

reform efforts in, 9 Dinescu, Mircea, 187

student protest in, 181-82 Djilas, Milovan, 16, 104

velvet revolution in, 51n61, 77, 174-83, 278 Djindjic, Zoran, 323, 325, 329-30

Czech Republic, 283-86, 301n39 Djukanovic¢, Milo, 331

EU admission of, 291 Djuri¢c, Mihailo, 211, 237n20 DMO (Damska Grupa Operacyjna). See Ladies

Dabéevic-Kuéar, Savka, 211, 212 Operational Unit Danube Circle, 110-11 Draskovic¢, Vuk, 227, 229-30

Danube river, 110-11 Drnovések, Janez, 287

Dayton Accords, 203, 322, 323 Dubéek, Alexander, 16, 179, 182, 192, 193

Debt, foreign Husak replaces, 75-76 in Bulgaria, 60, 168, 313, 315 Dunn, Elizabeth C., 273 in Czechoslovakia, 77, 175 Dzhurov, Dobri, 173, 174 in Hungary, 97

in Poland, 45, 270, 277 East Berlin, demonstrations, 166 in Romania, 69, 183 Eastern Europe. See also European Union;

in Yugoslavia, 224 individual countries

De Gaulle, Charles, 261 accession years in, 293-98 Delors, Jacques, 264 cold war era, 78, 288, 343-45, 349n2

Del Ponte, Carla, 328 communist parties, 22

De Maziere, Lothar, 248 democracy in, 286, 287, 344 Democracy and democratization. See also economic success in, 286

specific parties historical setting for 1989 collapse, 2-9 Croatia’s simulated, 327 1969 program and, 84

Eastern Europe, 286, 287, 344 pluralism in, 343-49 Freedom House ratings of countries’, six countries of, 291

348-49 stereotyped thinking about, 345-46 GDR, 164-65 USSR control over, 86 Hungary's multiparty, 107-10, 159 World War II era, 5-6 as political warfare, 347-48 Eastern European leaders, Gorbachev and, 95, Democratic League for the Defense of Human 115, 137

Rights, 170 East Germany. See German Democratic

Democratic Left Alliance, 271-72 Republic; Germany

Democratic opposition. See also Solidarity EC. See European Community

in Bulgaria, 172 Ecoglasnost, 172-73

in German Democratic Republic, 172 Economy. See also Agriculture; Centrally in Hungary, 104-6, 110-12, 115, 119n38, planned economies; Collectivization

120nn40-41, 131-32 of Albania, 335 in Poland, 131 autonomous, 98-100, 118nn10-11

in Romania, 185 of Bulgaria, 60, 87n5, 168-69, 170, 196n47,

in Slovenia, 221, 225-26 313-16

Index 355 of Czechoslovakia, 77, 174-75, 278-80 European Community (EC), 260-63

of Czech Republic, 283-86 European Court of Justice, 261-63 Eastern Europe’s successful, 286 European Free Trade Association, 289-90

EC institutions and, 260-63 European Investment Bank, 262

extensive strategy, 8 European Monetary System (EMS), 262-63 of GDR, 72-73, 163, 248-50, 266n18 European Round Table of Industrialists, 263 German unification concerns, 248-49 European Union (EU), 232, 259-64, 274, 277

of Hungary, 95-97, 276-77 admission criteria, 291-92, 303n60

intensive strategy, 8 Bulgaria’s entry into, 310, 315, 316

mid-1990s, 296 civil war roots of, 259-60

of Montenegro, 331-32 Croatian independence recognized by,

neoliberal, 269, 278, 299n3 233-34, 242n82

1930s, 5 Croatian membership in, 328-29

PHARE restructuring of, 290 Czech republic entry into, 291

of Poland, 45, 138-41, 270-73, 277 East European desire for admission to,

Poland-Hungary comparison of, 102 287-88 of Romania, 63, 68-69, 183, 184-85, 187, entry issues complexity, 292

308-9, 310 Hungary's entry in, 291-92 of200n115, Serbia, 323 laws, 263

single currency issue, 264 Maastricht Treaty creating, 268n52 Single Europe Act of 1987, 263-64, 268n51 Montenegro candidacy for, 332

of Slovakia, 282-83 nationalism and facisim kept in check

under Tito, 212-14 by, 297

transition, 308 PHARE program of, 290 of USSR, 80-83, 92n90, 92n96, 93n106, post-communist countries’ desire to join, 289

294-55 precursor organization to, 259-60

of Yugoslavia, 209, 212-14, 223-25, 240n59 Romania and, 310, 312

ECSC. See European Coal and Steel SAA with, 330

Community Slovenia’s entry into, 286

Elections. See also specific leaders technical nature of, 347

GDR 1989, 164, 194n21, 248 treaty on, 264 Gorbachev changes in, 83 women’s rights issues, 293-94

in Hungary, 107, 132-33, 160 Evolutionism, new, 13 Hungary's 1985 multiparty, 107 Execution Poland’s first open, 147-50, 155n86 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 191, 202n135

Russian Republic, 257 Nagy, 112

Slovenia’s first free, 286 Extensive strategy, 8 Yugoslavian republics’ free, 225-27, 240n69

Ellman, Michael, 254 Factory workers, 38-39, 53n108, 102. See also

Ember, Judit, 112 Solidarity; Strikes

EMS. See European Monetary System Workers Guards and, 160

Enlightenment, 3 Fascism, EU and, 297

Environmental activism, 171, 196n56 Federal Republic of Germany. See West

Esterhazy, Peter, 159 Germany

Estonia, 291 Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), 322, 331 Ethnic cleansing, 203, 278 Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 322

in Kosova, 324 FIDESz (Fiatal Demokratak Szévetsége). See

in Zvornik, 235 Alliance of Free Democrats

EU. See European Union Fighting Solidarity, 147

Euratom, 260 Fish, Steven, 282

Europe Flat tax, 296 1914-1945 civil war in, 259 Flying University, 31, 35, 105

Agreement, 310 Fojtik, Jan, 174, 182, 199n107 Single Europe Act of 1987, 263-64, 268n51 Founding Committee for Free Trade Unions,

European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 32, 38

259-60 France-Germany relations, 261, 274

356 INDEX

Frasyniuk, Wiadistaw, 144 Warsaw Pact troops stationed in, 246 Frederick the Great, 72, 164 workers and peasants’ state in, 69-75, 91n6 Free Democrats, 113-14, 275 German Unity Fund, 249 Freedom House, 348-49 Germany, 242n82. See also West Germany FRY. See Federal Republic of Yugoslavia corruption in, 244 FSN (Frontul Salvarii Nationale). See -France relations, 261, 274

National Salvation Front -Poland relations, 273-74

Funar, Georghe, 308 Serbia occupied by, 206

Fund for the Assistance to the Poor, 105 Germany, unification of, 2, 162-67, 244-52,

Furet, Francois, 348 264, 346

Fydrych, Waldemar, 138 abortion law problem in, 251, 266n25 cost of, 248

Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Dam, 110-11, 138, 159 economic concerns in, 248-49

Gallagher, Tom, 310-11 efforts towards, 71-72 Ganev, Venelin, 313-15 referendum on, 248

Gang of Four, 70 Gewandhaus Orchestra, 166 fifth wheel of, 78-79 Gheorghiu-Dej, 59, 63, 187

Garton Ash, Timothy, 179, 182 Gierek, Edward

Gaspar, Sandor, 100 era of, 19-23

Gates, Robert M., 84, 93n109, 252 investment policy of, 28

Gati, Charles, 6, 70, 89n46 leadership style of, 31, 52n79 GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and replacement of, 40

Trade underground press allowed by, 29-31, 37

De Gaulle, Charles, 18 worker bribes of, 36-37 Gdansk shipyard, 130 Giurescu, Dinu, 186

GDP. See Gross domestic product Glasnost, 82, 86, 92n97, 137 GDR. See German Democratic Republic Eco-, 172-73

Gebert, Konstanty, 25, 84 Glass, Christy M., 293

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Glemp, Cardinal, 44-45, 128, 133-34

(GATT), 173, 260 Gligorov, Kiro, 227, 231, 332, 333 General strike Glos, 30, 32 in Czechoslovakia, 182-83, 199n107 Goebbels, Joseph, 3

1981, 42-43, 46 Goma, Paul, 67

in Poland, 42-43, 46, 56n137, 129 Gomutka, Wiadistaw, 18, 19, 31, 34

in Romania, 189 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 69, 93n106, 166. See also

TKK late 1980s use of, 129 Perestroika

Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 86 approval ratings, 267n40

Georgia, republic of, 253, 258 Berlin wall collapse and, 245 Gerber Foods-Alima privatization, 273 Brezhnev and, 79-82, 115 Geremek, Bronistaw, 54n111, 141, 145, 149 Ceausescu, Nicolae, and, 95, 115, 185

German Democratic Republic (GDR). See charisma of, 86 also Economy; Germany; Germany, credit to, 345

unification of Eastern European leaders and, 95, 115, 137

abortion laws in West Germany compared era, 79-86

to, 251, 266n25 farewell speech, 258-59

antipoliticians of 1989, 164-65 freedom of choice philosophy of, 253-54 demonstrations in 1989, 165 German unification and NATO concerns of,

election of 1989, 164, 194n21, 248 250-51

fortieth anniversary, 165-66 glasnost policy of, 82, 86, 92n97, 137,

great exodus of 1989, 163 172-73

Helsinki Accords recognizing, 26, 71 green lights Bulgaria, 173

hostility toward, 25-26 Honecker and, 95, 115, 165, 194n28

refugees, 162 ideals/aversion to violence of, 253-54 Stasi of, 74, 90n64, 164, 165, 244-45 loss of control, 256-57

travel rule changes in, 166-67, 195n39 miscalculations of, 85-86, 94n116

vacationers’ escape from, 157-58 office of president created by, 115

Index 357 Rakowski meeting with, 150, 156n95 World War II to 1989, 7 reform policies of, 114-15, 122n74 Hitler, Adolf, 343

West and, 79-80, 85 Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, 253 Yeltsin’s criticism of, 256 Holbrooke, Richard, 322, 324

Zhivkov, T., and, 95 holidays, battle over, 180 Gotovina, Ante, 328 Holocaust in Romania, 311

Great Britain nationalization, 5-6 Honecker, Erich, 70, 71, 90n51, 164, 166

Great Novena, 34 fraudulent election results, 164, 194n21 Great Reform Act of 1832, 348 Gorbachev and, 95, 115, 165, 194n28

Greece, 58, 349 indictment of, 244, 265n3 hostility over Macedonia name, 333 Horizontalists, 44 Gromyko, Andrei, 84-85, 115, 345-46 Horn, Gyula, 162 Gross domestic product (GDP), 296 Hoxha, Enver, 78-79

Grosz, Karoly, 108, 109, 113 Human rights, 170, 179-80

divide and rule tactics of, 158-59 abortion as issue of, 294-95, 303n69

Groza, Petru, 123 MRE, 313

Gutman, Roy, 318 women and, 293-94 Gwiazda, Andrzej, 41, 43, 55n121, 143 Hungarian Democratic Forum, 113, 114, 158,

Gypsies, Roma, 297-98, 305n90 160, 161, 274-77 Hungarian National Planning Office, 7

Habsburg empire, 204-5, 326 Hungarian Revolution of 1948, 117

Hadzi¢, Goran, 330 Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 57, 108, 112, 117 Hall, Aleksander, 128 Hungarian Socialist Workers party, 100-101,

Hallstein Doctrine, 70 103-4, 110, 113 Hankiss, Elemer, 100 decline, 158-59 Haraszti, Miklds, 104-5, 120n41 Hungary, 33

Harich, Wolfgang, 73 Antall’s program in, 275-76 Havasi, Ferenc, 97 anti-Semitism of Csurka in, 275-76 Havel, Vaclav, 16, 17, 22, 47n13, 138, 192, 193 Austro-Hungarian state, 204-5

background and character of, 175-76, democratic opposition in, 104-6, 110-12,

197n71 115, 119n38, 120nn40-41, 131-32

imprisonment of, 176-77, 180, 197n77 demonstrations over holidays and history in,

NATO expansion endorsed by, 302n54 111-12, 116-17 “The Power of the Powerless,” 24, 50n50 economic reforms in, 95-104, 118n9

as president, 183, 280 elections in, 107, 132-33, 160

rock music activism of, 26 EU admission of, 291-92 velvet revolution role of, 180-83 gradualism in, 274-78

writings of, 176 life expectancy of men in, 103, 119n37

Havemann, Robert, 73, 90n61 minorities in Transylvania and elsewhere, HDZ (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica). See 111, 186-87, 201n123, 309

Croatian Democratic Union multiparty democracy in, 107-10, 159 Helsinki Accords of 1975, 28, 50n56, 187 name change, 161

Basket Three, 26 NATO demands of, 289 Charter 77 and, 25-27 1970s, 95-97 GDR recognized by, 26, 71 1980s, 100-104

German unification and, 247 1989, 123, 158-62

Helsinki Watch, 26 1989 negotiated revolution, 158-62 Herzegovina, 206, 237, 322 perestroika in, 107, 113-15

Bosnia-, 231 privatization in, 276-77

Hirmondo, 106 property ownership alternate forms in, 101-3 Historical exhibit, public reaction to, 1, 9n1 refugee aid in, 111, 162

Historical memory response to Gorbachev's initiatives, 95, 115 control of Romanian, 66 second economy in, 98-101, 118nn10-11 demonstrations over Hungarian, 111-12, strike in, 276

116-17 Warsaw pact troops withdrawal from, 115, 275

Historical setting, 1989 collapse, 2-9 Hunger strikes, in Bulgaria, 170

358 INDEX

Hus, Jan, 177-78 JNA VJugoslovenska narodna armija). See Husak, Gustav, 17, 22, 27, 70, 95 Yugoslav National Army

Dubéek replaced by, 75-76 John Paul II (pope)

normalization under B’ilak and, 76-77 assassination attempt, 168, 195n44

resignation of, 183 visits Czechoslovakia, 178

Husak/B’ilak regime, 174, 176, 179 visits Poland, 35-36, 53n93, 53n98, 133 HVO (Hrvatsko vijece odbrane). See Croatian Jovi¢, Borislav, 224, 230

Defense Council July theses of 1971, 64

Hyperrationalism, 3-4, 6, 23, 343

Brezhnev’s, 8-9 Kadar, Janos, 62, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108-9, 110

end of, 116 Nagy’s execution and, 112

Kolakowski on, 24 politics of reconciliation, 95 promotion of, 113

ICTY. See International Criminal Tribunal Kania, Stanislaw, 40, 43, 44

for Yugoslavia Karabakh, Nagorno, 253

[liescu, Ion, 306-7, 311 Kardelj, Edvard, 209, 210

IMF. See International Monetary Fund Kavan, Jan, 179-80, 198n92 Imperialism, cold war era end of, 344, 349n2 KGB, 168, 258

IMRO. See International Macedonian Khrushchev, Nikita, 49n30, 63, 78, 83-84, 345

Revolutionary Organization Kideckle, David, 307 Independent Association for the Defense of Kiraly, Béla, 276

Human Rights, 179-80 Kis, Janos, 105, 106, 110, 114, 275 Independent Publishing House, 30-31 Kiszczak, General, 135, 143, 147, 150

Industrialization, 2-3 Klaus, Vaclav, 182, 278-80, 283-85, 301n39

Romania and, 63 resignation of, 285

Intensive strategy, 8 Kociolek, Stanislaw, 135 Interfactory Strike Committee, 38-39 Kohl, Helmut, 245-51 International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia agreement between Mitterrand and, 264

(ICTY), 317, 318-19, 324-25, 328, Bush and, 250

339n40 election won by, 251

International Macedonian Revolutionary Kohout, Pavel, 26-27 Organization (IMRO), 227, 316-17 Kolakowski, Leszek, 18, 23-24, 27, 47n17, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 97, Komarek, Valtr, 278-79

137, 287 Konig, Cardinal, 35-36

International relations, change since 1989, Konrad, Gyorgy, 24, 104

344, 350n3 Kontorovich, Vladimir, 254 Irredentism, 219 KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotnik6w). See Islam, 169-70 Committee for the Defense of Workers Izetbegovic, Alija, 227, 231, 234, 235 Kornai, Janos, 82, 254 Korom, Mihaly, 100

Jakes, Milos, 174, 175, 179, 182 KOS (Komitety Oporu Spotecznego). See

Jankowski, Henryk, 134 Circles of Social Resistance

Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 43, 44-46, 55n131, Kosova, 206, 209-10, 235, 237n11

95, 345 declaration of independence, 228

economic 1986 policies of, 138-41 ethnic cleansing in, 324

election as president, 148-49 independence, 326

glasnost and, 137 Milosevic refusing autonomy of, 218-20

lack of support for, 345-46 NATO occupation of, 317 normalization strategy of, 124-25, 133 refugees from, 333-34

permissible pluralism of, 130-33, 135-38 Serbia and, 211, 214-16, 238n30, 322-26, 330

and Popiefuszko murderers, 135 Kosovar Albanians

roundtable proposed by, 143 Bosnia war and, 324 underground Solidarity and, 125-30 NATO defense of, 310, 337n11

Jedlicki, Jerzy, 31 Kosovo, 237n11

Jedwabne, 297 Kostov, Ivan, 314

Index 359

KoStunica, Vojislav, 329 Malinowski, Roman, 149

Kovac, Michal, 283 Manea, Norman, 25, 66-67

Krajina, 229 March Days in Poland, 18, 19, 48n21 Kramer, Mark, 243 Markov, Georgi, assassination of, 168 Krenz, Egon, 164, 166, 245 Markovic, Ante, 223-27, 233

Krol, Marcin, 31 Marshall Plan, 260

Kuéan, Milan, 221, 226 Martial law, in Poland, 45-46, 55n131, 56n134,

Kuklinski, Ryszard, 43 56n137, 57, 124-25 Kulerski, Wiktor, 126, 134, 142 economy at time of, 138-39 Kulik, Ewa, 37, 127 Reagan’s response to, 137 Kundera, Milan, 16, 25, 136, 176 Martinovic, Djordje, 216

Kuron, Jacek, 15-16, 18, 23, 45, 48n20, 135 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 3, 16, 18, 57, 67

as antipolitician, 27-28 Masaryk, Tomasgs, 204, 278 KOR activism of, 37, 53n102 Massey-Ferguson-Perkins, 22, 49n36

prison writings of, 126 Masur, Kurt, 166 Kusin, Vlad, 76 Matica hrvatska, 211-12, 229, 237n22

Kusy, Miroslav, 177 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 123, 149, 192, 270

Kuznetsov, V. V., 75 leftist approach of, 280

Kwasniewski, Aleksander, 272, 289 prime minister appointment of, 150 MDF (Magyar Demokrata Forum). See

Labour government, Great Britain, 5-6 Hungarian Democratic Forum Ladies Operational Unit, 127 Meciar, Vladimir, 281, 282-83, 289, 297

Lafontaine, Oskar, 248 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3 Lange, Oskar, 6, 10n17 Mesic¢, Stipe, 230, 234

Large Privatization Act, 279 Messner, Zbigniew, 133, 140-41, 143 Law of Individual Economic Activity, 82 Michnik, Adam, 18, 24, 28, 35, 135, 148

Law on State Enterprise, 82 new evolutionism of, 32

LCY. See League of Communists of Solidarity leadership of, 30

Yugoslavia Walesa criticized by, 271

League of Communists of Slovenia, 221 Mickiewicz, Adam, 18 League of Communists of Yugoslavia Mielke, Erich, 165

(LCY), 225 Mihailovi¢c, Draza, 207

Legitimists, 131, 135 Mihaylov family, 171 Leipzig demonstrations, 166 Mikhailov, Stoyan, 171 Leninist party, 41, 116 Mikulic¢, Branko, 223

Lenin Shipyard (Gdansk), 20, 32, 37, 38 Military Council for National Salvation, 46,

Lipski, Jan Jozef, 29 124, 150n3

Lithuania, 256 MiloSevic, Slobodan, 216-20, 228, 231, 317 Lithuanian Reform Movement, 253 Bosnian war and, 234-35, 319

Living in truth, 25, 27, 77 Croatian-Serbian violence under, 229-30

Luczywo, Helena, 127, 146 death of, 325 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 104 demonstrations against, 323 Lukashenko, Alexander, 5 FRY dominated by, 322-23 Lukhanoy, Andrei, 173, 174, 313 indictment, 324-25

Lustration Law, 280-81 1989 election of, 226-27 Luther, Martin, 72, 164 Slovenian pluralism and, 221-22 Mindszenty, Jozsef, 33

Maastricht Treaty, 268n52 Ministry of Ownership Transformation

Macedonia, 205, 231, 233-34 (Poland), 272 Albanians in, 332-34 Miodowicz, Alfred, 132, 140

Bulgaria relations with, 315, 316-17 Mitterrand, Francois, 79, 247

civil war, 318 agreement between Kohl and, 264 free elections in, 227 MKS (Miedzyzakiadowy Komitet

Macedonians, in Bulgaria, 169-70 Strajkowy). See Interfactory Strike

Macovei, Monica, 311-12 Committee

360 INDEX

Mladenov, Pettir, 168, 173, 174 in Czechoslovakia, 75-78 Zhivkov, T., replaced by, 174 in Poland, 124-25, 133 Mladic, Ratko, 321, 330 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Mladina controversy, 220-21, 225 203, 246, 260, 334

Mlynay, Zdenék, 27 Bulgaria’s entry into, 316 Moczulski, Leszek, 143 cold war era, 288 Modrow, Hans, 244, 245, 247 creation of, 259

Modzelewski, Karol, 15-16, 18, 40, 48n20 expansion, 288-89, 302n54

as Solidarity spokesman, 43 German unification concerns, 250-51

Monnet, Jean, 259 Hungary's entry requirements, 289 Montenegro, 331-32 Kosova occupation by, 317

Morawiecki, Kornel, 127-28 Kosovar Albanians defended by, 310, 337n11 Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF), 313 pluralism cause helped by, 289

Movement in Defense of Human and Civil Romania's denied negotiations with, 310

Rights, 32 troops, 321, 324

MRE. See Movement for Rights and Freedom war against Serbia, 310, 321, 324-25, 336,

Mussolini, Benito, 78 337n11

Myant, Martin, 11n28, 139 Nostalgia, post-communist, 346-47 Novotny, Antonin, 17

Nagorno-Karabakh, 253 NOWA (Niezalezna Oficyna Wydawnicza). See

Nagy, Imre, 104, 112, 116 Independent Publishing House

reburial of, 117 Nowak, Mieczystaw, 134

Nano, Fatos, 336 Nyers, Rezs0, 8, 104, 107, 159, 161 National Coordinating Commission of the

Solidarity union, 45 Oder-Neisse border, 274

National Council of Slovenes, Croats and OECD. See Organization for European

Serbs, 205 Cooperation and Development

National Councils of Workers’ Democracy, OEED. See Organization for European

185-86 Economic Development

in Poland, 34 Oil USSR, 252-53 1973 embargo, 96

Nationalism and nationalization Ohrid Agreement, 334

World War II era, 5-6 Romanian, 68-69

xenophobic, 297 Olszowski, Stefan, 135, 153n45 National Salvation Front (NSF), 191, 306, 309 Omarska camp, 318

NATO. See North Atlanticc Treaty Openness Club, 114

Organization Opposition Roundtable, in Hungary, 159-60

Nazis, 3, 71, 181 OPZZ (Ogoélnopolskie Porozumiene Zwiazkéw Nedic¢, Milan, 207 Zawadowych). See All-Poland Alliance of

Negotiated Revolution, 274 Trade Unions in Hungary, 158-62 Orange Alternative, 138 NEM. See New Economic Mechanism Orban, Viktor, 276, 277

Németh, Miklos, 159, 162 Orenstein, Mitchell A., 273 Neoliberalism, 269, 278, 299n3 Organization for European Cooperation and Network of Free Initiatives, 113-14 Development (OECD), 260, 290, 302n56

New class (Djilas), 16, 32 Organization for European Economic New Economic Mechanism (NEM), 8, 96, 97, Development (OEED), 260

100, 168 Organization for Security and Cooperation in

New evolutionism, 32 Europe (OSCE), 260, 282, 287, 288 New Forum, 164-66, 246 Orwell, George, 136

New March Front, 114 Ost, David, 18, 124 New Measures, Tito’s, 209 Owen, David, 319 Nineteenth All-Union Party Conference,

114-15 Pacifists of GDR, 74

Nobel Peace Prize, 132, 257 Palach, Jan, 179-80

Normalization Palairet, Michael, 224

Index 361 Party of Democratic Socialism, 246 Russian administration of, 87n1

Pascal, Blaise, 10n10 sanctions on, 137 Paths of health, 42 shock therapy in, 270-73 Patriotic People’s Front (PPF), 107 strikes and roundtable in, 142-46, 155n80 Peasants strikes in, 19-22, 27-30, 36-39, 42-43, 48n22, Albanian agriculture by, 334-35 48n25, 49n30, 53n108, 54n114, 130, 149 GDR workers and, 69-75, 91n6 student protests in, 18-19, 47n17

Pensions, 295-96, 304n78 Wildcat strikes in, 27, 149

People’s Republic of Albania, 78 Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP), 39, 44,

Perestroika, 81, 82, 83, 86 54n116, 146, 149, 155n83

in Bulgaria, 172 Politics

in Czechoslovakia, 179 alternating right-left, 271-72, 285-86 in Hungary, 107, 113-15 democracy as war of, 347-48

Pereustroistvo, 169, 171 of reconciliation, 95

Perkins engines, 22, 49n36 Pope John Paul II. See John Paul I

Peterle, Lojze, 226 Popietuszko, Jerzy, 133-35, 152n43, 152n44

Petlice, 29 Post-communism era. See also Accession years PHARE (Poland/Hungary: Assistance for EU membership and, 289

Restructuring Economies), 290 leadership in Bulgaria, 313

Piran controversy, 328-29 nostalgia, 313

Pirker, Pero, 212 Powell, Colin, 319 Pirvulescu, Constantin, 188 Pozsgay, Imre, 107, 108, 109, 113, 159

Plan bargaining, 99-100 historical commission report by, 116 The Plastic People of the Universe, 26, 51n58 parliamentary election of, 160-62

Pluralism, 3, 4-5, 10n8, 343-49 PPF. See Patriotic People’s Front

beginnings of, 23 Prague, historical exhibit in, 1, 9n1 communism compared to, 346-47 Prague Spring, 9, 16, 57, 75, 179

in Hungary, 103, 109-10, 114, 115 media during, 278 Jaruzelski’s permissible, 130-33, 135-38 trend indicated by, 345

NATO helping cause of, 289 Praxis, 16

Poland’s underground press as, 128 President. See also specific presidents

Slovenian, 221-22 Gorbachev creating office of, 115

socialist, 107, 140, 153n60 Pozsgay’s parliamentary election to, 160-62

success of, 349 Privatization

Poland. See also Economy; Martial law, in in Croatia, 327 Poland; Solidarity; Underground press, in Czechoslovakia, 279-80

Poland’s; Unions, in Poland in Czech Republic, 284-86 antipoliticians in, 23-25, 29, 36 in Hungary, 276-77 anti-Semitism in, 18, 48n18, 141, 297 in Montenegro, 332

battle of crosses in, 129 of pensions, 295-96, 304n78 Catholic church in, 33-36, 125, 133-36 in Poland, 140, 143, 272-73

EU admission of, 291-92 in Romania, 308 general strikes in, 42-43, 46, 56n137, 129 in Slovakia, 283

-Germany relations, 273-74 in Slovenia, 286

Gierek’s era in, 19-23 voucher plan, 284, 285 Interfactory strikes in, 38, 53n108 Protest. See also Demonstrations; General

John Paul II visits, 35-36, 53n98, 133 strike; Strikes

March Days in, 18, 19, 48n21 Albanian miners, 219 Messner’s referendum of 1987, 140-41 ecology-related, 110-11

1968, 18, 19-20 GDR fortieth anniversary, 165-66 1970s civil society, 27-33 GDR weak forms of, 73-75

1976, 28-30 over holidays, 111-12, 116-17

1980s, 102, 123-50 over price increases in Poland, 142 open elections in, 147-50, 155n86 student, 17-18, 47n15, 181-82 Popieluszko murder in, 133-35, 152n43, 152n44 worker, 19, 32, 48n21

response to Gorbachev's initiatives, 95 Protestant ethic, 348

362 INDEX Public Against Violence (VPN), 181, 281 Romania, 62-69, 183-193, 306-13. See also

Pucnik, Joze, 224 Ceausescu, Nicolae; Economy

Puritan Revolution, 348 abortions outlawed in, 68, 89n41, 89n44, 184 PUWP. See Polish United Workers’ Party antipoliticians in, 187-88

Pyramid schemes, 308, 335 anti-Semitism in, 309, 311 Bulgaria and, 58-59

Rabotnik, 30, 54n111, 127 coal miners in, 307-8

Radic, Stjepan, 205 corruption in, 311-12 Radio Free Europe, 106, 179, 181, 185, 188, 221 end of Ceausescu period, 183-93, 202n135 Radom, 28-29 EU and NATO admission of, 310 Rajk, Laszlo, 105 general strike in, 189 Rakosi, Matyas, 112 Holocaust in, 311 Rakowski, Mieczyslaw, 35, 42, 125, 132, independence of, 63, 69

143, 147 industrialization in, 63 Ralin, Radoi, 61 1930s, 87n3

and Gorbachev, 150, 156n95 land privatization in, 308

Rankovic, Aleksandar, 209-10, 211 1970s criticism of, 187

RaSskovic, Jovan, 229 nineteenth-century, 58 Rational Nourishment Commission, 183 oil industry, 68-69

Reagan, Ronald, 137, 263, 345 postwar period of, 58-59 Reconstruction of names, 170 revolution in, 188-93

Red Army, 57, 345 strikes in, 185, 189, 307

Referendum Timisoara massacre, 188-90

for EU admission, 292 ROPCiO (Ruch Obrony Praw Cztowieku i on German unification, 248 Obywatelstwa). See Movement in Defense

Messner’s 1987, 140-41 of Human and Civil Rights on USSR federation of equal republics, 257 Rothschild, Joseph, 7, 86 Reform. See also specific countries; specific Roundtable

leaders in Bulgaria, 174

Great Reform Act of 1832, 348 Czechoslovak, 183

pre-1968, 8-9, 11n28 European Round Table of Industrialists, 263 Reform Circles Alliance, 161 Grosz’s attempted, 158-59

Refugees Hungary's Opposition, 159-60 GDR, 162 in Poland, 142-46, 155n80 in Hungary, 111, 162 Rukh, 274 Kosova, 333-34 Rural Solidarity, 41-42, 43

Slovenia’s Yugoslavian, 287 Ruse environmental activism, 171, 196n56

Turkish, 170 Rusinow, Dennison, 209

Republic of Macedonia, 334. See also Russian administration of Poland, 87n1

Macedonia Russian republic, 257

Res Publica, 136-37 Russian Supreme Soviet, 256 Revolution. See also specific countries

American, 348 SAA. See Stabilization and Association

negotiated, 158-62, 274 Agreement

Puritan, 348 Sachs, Jeffrey, 270

Solidarity as self-limiting, 58 Sakharov, Andrei, 83, 93n112 velvet, 51n61, 77, 174-83, 278 Samizdat, 29, 52n71, 105, 120n41, 185, Revolutions of 1989, international relations 200n118

changed by, 344, 350n3 Sanader, Ivo, 328 Reykjavik summit, 93n112 SANU. See Serbian Academy of Sciences

Roberts, Andrew, 297 SANU Memorandum, 217, 220 Rock music, 26-27, 51n58, 60, 73 Sarajevo, 235

Rolin, Radoi, 61, 172 siege of, 320

Roma gypsies, 297-98, 305n90 Savranskaya, Svetlana, 346

Roman, Petre, 307 Schabowski, Gtinter, 167

Index 363

Schuman Robert, 259 argument, 11n18 SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative capitalism replaced by, 5-6 SdRP (Socjaldemokracja Rzeczpospolitej with human face, 17, 77 Polskiej). See Social Democratic Party of Socialist pluralism, 107, 140, 153n60

Poland Socialist surrealism, 137

Second economy, 98-101, 118nn10-11 Socialist Unity Party, 71, 166

Secret police. See also Stasi Socialist Youth Union, 181 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 67 Social Self-Defense Committee, 29, 52n70

Sen, Amartya, 343 Social stratification in Bulgaria, 61-62 Serbia, 237n20. See also Milosevic, Slobodan Solidarity, 20, 30, 36-40, 105

as anti-Western, 330 Catholic church support for, 136

-Croatia war, 229-32 469 days, 40-45

economy of, 323 Jaruzelski as leader of, 43, 55n131 elections in, 226-27 legalization of, 143-44 geopolitical position of, 330-31 during martial law, 124-25

German occupied-, 206 1986 amnesty and, 135-38

Kosova and, 211, 214-16, 238n30, permissible pluralism and, 135-38

322-26, 330 regime negotiations, 144-48

NATO war against, 310, 321, 324-25, 336, registration crisis, 40-41

337n11 Rural, 41-42, 43

1990s, 326-31 as self-limiting revolution, 58 1995 emigration from, 323 suppression of, 131 World War I, 204 takes power, 146-50, 270 Yugoslavia experiment and, 205-7 underground, 125-30

Serbian Academy of Sciences (SANU), Solidarity Provisional Council, 135-36

217, 220 Solidarity Tax, 250, 266n23

Serbian Renewal Movement, 227 Srebrenica massacre, 321, 330 Serbo-Croatian war. See Bosnia Stabilization and Association Agreement Sedelj, Vojislav, 229, 322, 323-24, 330 (SAA), 330, 332, 336

Shafir, Michael, 67 Stalin and Stalinism, 6-7, 23 Shevardnadze, Deuard, 85 Bulgaria, 58 Sila- Nowicki, Wladystaw, 136 Gang of Four, 70, 78-79

Simekéa, Milan, 76-77, 78 Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, 253

338n30 116-17

Simeon, Saksekoburggotski, (“The King”), 316, Hungarian celebrations of freedom from,

Single Europe Act of 1987, 263-64, 268n51 MiloSevic’s belief in, 218

Skubiszewski, Krzysztof, 274 1985 new cohorts of, 79 SLD (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratyczne)j). See Romania’s, 58, 65

Democratic Left Alliance Stalin’s death, 7

Slovakia, 33, 178-79 USSR progress after, 80-81 Czech lands split from, 281-82 Stambolic¢, Ivan, 217, 218 Meciar’s rule of, 281, 282-83, 289, 297 Stark, David, 102

Slovenia, 205, 233, 286-87 Star Wars, 345

abortion laws in, 287 Stasi, 74, 90n64, 164, 165, 244-45

Croatia and, 220-23 State power

democratic opposition in, 221, 225-26 communist belief in enhanced, 6, 10n12

pluralism in, 221-22 corruption and, 313-14

Smallholders party, 161-62, 276-77 pluralism and, 4

Smith, Adam, 4 State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, 331 Social Accords, 40, 132 Stépan, Miroslav, 179, 182-83 Social Consultative Council, 136 Stepinac, Alojzje, 33

Social Democratic Party, 309 Stone, Norman, 86

Social Democratic Party of Poland, 271 Stoph, Willy, 244 Social Democrats, 248, 249, 251, 266n15 Stoyanov, Petur, 314

Socialism, 10n17, 15 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 345

364. INDEX

Strikes. See also General strike two plus four, 251

in Bulgaria, 62, 170 Treuhand (Treuhandanstalt), 250

in Hungary, 276 Tripalo, Mika, 212

leadership of, 37-38 TRS (Tymczasowa Rada Solidarnosci). See in Poland, 19-22, 27-30, 36-39, 48n22, Solidarity Provisional Council 48n25, 49n30, 54n114, 130, 142-46, 149, Trud, 171

155n80 Trybuna Ludu, 139

Poland’s roundtable and, 142-46, 155n80 Tudjman, Franjo, 211-12, 222, 226, 228-29, 231,

Poland’s Wildcat, 27, 149 317, 319-20

in Romania, 185, 189, 307 Bosnia partition plan of, 234 in Szczecin, 19-20, 22, 39, 40, 54n111 regime of, 327

USSR miners’ 1990, 255 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim, 309, 312 Strossmayer, Josip Juraj, 203-4, 231 Turkey, 316, 317

Strougal, Lubomir, 76 Turks, 169-70

Student protests, 17-18, 47n15 Tvar, 16 Czechoslovakia, 181-82 Two plus four treaty, 251 Poland, 18-19, 47n17 Tygodnik Mazowsze, 134, 145, 146 Suslov, Mikhail, 345-46

Szab6, Miklos, 105 UDE. See Union of Democratic Forces Szczecin strikes, 19-20, 22, 39, 40, 54n111 Uhl, Petr, 26-27, 177, 181, 199n102 SzDSz (Szabad Demokratak Szévetsége). See Ukraine, 274

Free Democrats Ulbricht, Walter, 71, 168

Szelényi, Ivan, 99, 104 Underground press, Poland’s, 29-33, 52n70, 92n73, 53n93

Tadic, Boris, 329 Gierek allowance of, 29-31, 37 Tagliabue, John, 147 legalization of, 135-37

Tax as pluralism, 128 flat, 296 Solidarity during Jaruzelski era, 125-30 Solidarity, 250, 266n23 women in, 127 127, 129 Unions, 113. See also European Union;

Temporary Coordinating Commission, Unemployment, 296, 333

Thaci, Hashim, 326 Solidarity; specific unions Thatcher, Margaret, 86, 247, 263 OPZZ, 140

Tiananmen Square, 164 Yugoslav, 222-23

Timisoara, 188-90 Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), 174, 313 Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 312, 350n3 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). See

Tito, Josip Broz, 18, 33, 206, 207-9 also Economy

death of, 212-13 Bush relations with, 265n10

economic downturn under, 212-14 collapse, 243, 252-59, 344, 345 restructuring and dominance by, 212 coup of August 1990, 257-58 TKK (Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna). demonstrations by, 253

See Temporary Coordinating Eastern Europe control by, 86

Commission elections in, 83

Todorova, Maria, 62 ethnic groups in, 252 Todkés, Laszlo, 188 interventions, 69-70 Tomac, Zdravko, 226 mining strikes in, 255

Tomasek, Frantisek, 178 nationalism force in, 252-53 Transylvania Hungarians, 111, 186-87, progress after Stalin, 80-81

201n123, 309 Romania’s independence from, 63, 69

Treaties. See also North Atlantic Treaty stereotyped thinking about collapse of, 345

Organization will to use force decline in, 345-46 Basic, 71 Unions, in Poland, 19-20, 32, 38, 39, 54n115,

Maastricht, 268n52 130. See also Solidarity

Treaty on European Union, 264 All-Poland Alliance of Trade, 140, 147

Trianon, 275 self-governing, 130, 132

Index 365

Rights, 27 144-48

United Nations Declaration on Human in Solidarity-regime negotiations,

United Nations Protective Force strikes managed by, 38, 53n108, 142-43 (UNPROFOR), 233, 319, 321 TRS created by, 135-36 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation War. See Wars of Yugoslav Succession; World

Administration (UNRRA), 213, 238n25 War II era; specific countries

United States (US) Warsaw Pact, 17, 149, 173, 180. See also Prague

Bosnian war response, 321-22 Spring

as only superpower, 344 Bulgarian membership in, 316

UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), 325 cold war era and, 288 UNPROFOR. See United Nations Protective dissolution of, 302n47

Force troops, 115, 246, 273, 275

UNRRA. See United Nations Relief and withdrawal from Afghanistan, 115

Rehabilitation Administration withdrawal from Hungary, 115, 275

Urban, Jan, 179 Warski Shipyard (Szczecin), 19-20, 22, 39, 40, Urban, Jerzy, 133, 135, 150, 152n44 54n111

Ursus (industrial section of Warsaw), 22, 28,37, | Wars of Yugoslav Succession, 228-32

49n36, 126 Warszawski, David, 84

US. See United States Washington Agreement, 320 USSR. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Washington Consensus, 269, 278

Ustashe, 206-7, 229 Weber, Max, 348 West

Vaculik, Ludvik, 16, 25, 29 anti-Western sentiment, 330 Value added tax (VAT), 296 Gorbachev and, 79-80, 85

Vance, Cyrus, 319 Westad, Odd Arne, 343

Vasarhelyi, Miklos, 112 Western Balkans, 317-18, 334, 347. See also

VAT. See Value added tax individual states Velchev, Boris, 59 West Germany (Federal Republic of

Velehrad, 178 Germany) Velvet Divorce, 282 abortion laws in GDR compared to, 251,

Velvet revolution, 51n61, 77, 174-83, 278 266n25 Charter 77 and, 176-78, 180 Berlin wall between East and, 70, 162-67,

Venezuela, 5 188, 245 Verdery, Katherine, 64, 66, 88n21, 312 isolation from East Germany, 25-26 Victory Square (Warsaw), 35 political parties of, 248

Videnovy, Zhan, 314 unification efforts and, 71-72 Visegrad countries, 288, 290 Wiesel, Elie, 311

Vojvodina, 209-11 Wildcat strikes, 27, 149 VONS (Vybor na obranu nespravedlive Wilson, Woodrow, 205 stihanych). See Committee for the Defense | Wojtyla, Karol, 33, 35, 53n93, 168, 195n43

of the Unjustly Persecuted Wolf, Christa, 74 Voucher privatization, 284, 285 Wolnos¢é i Pok6j, 137 VPN (Verejnost’ proti nasiliu). See Public Women

Against Violence EU equal rights issues for, 293-94 Vuchev, Kliment, 314 in underground press, 127

Vuillamy, Ed, 318 Worker protests. See also Peasants; Strikes March Days, 19, 48n21

Walentynowicz, Anna, 37, 38, 43, 55n124 in Poland, 19, 32, 48n21 Walesa, Lech, 32, 37-40, 44-45, 131-32 Workers Guards, 160

general strike opposed by, 42-43 Working class, 32 Jaruzelski’s tactics against, 130-31 World Bank, 97, 260

Kwasniewski replaces, 289 pension plan, 295

as president of Poland, 271, 272 World market, 9, 97, 140 release of, 125, 130, 151n22 World Trade Organization (WTO), 260, 287, 327

366 INDEX

World War II era ICTY, 317, 318-19, 324-25, 328, 339n40 nationalism, 5-6 international reaction to events in 1990, Yugoslavia experiment during, 206-8 232-34 Yugoslavia prior to, 203-6 MiloSevic’s dominance in, 216-20 WRON (Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia origins of, 203-9 Narodowego). See Military Council for refugees from, 287

National Salvation republics comprising, 206, 322, 331, 332 WTO. See World Trade Organization republics’ free elections, 225-27, 240n69

Wujek mine, 46, 56n137 second, 206-9 Wyszynski, Stefan, 34-35, 42, 129, 150n7 third, 322 unions, 222-23

Yakovlev, Alexander, 85 to World War II, 203-6 Yakovlev, Yegor, 257 World War II era, 206-8 Yeltsin, Boris, 255-56 Yugoslavism, 203-4, 206, 236n3 Congress of People’s Deputies election, 256 Yugoslav National Army, 230, 231-32, 235 Gorbachev criticized by, 256

KGB coup handled by, 258 Zhelev, Zhelyu, 172, 313 Russian republic election of, 257 Zhivkov, Todor, 9n1, 58-59, 313 Yugoslavia, 78, 83-84. See also Economy; agricultural policies of, 171

individual republics Bulgaria under, 59-62, 87n5, 168-74 civil war in, 203, 224, 228-32 fall of, 168-74

constitution of 1921, 205 Gorbachev and, 95

constitution of 1974, 211, 216, 218, 230 Zhivkov, Vladmir, 171, 173

decentralization, 208-12, 223-25 Zhivkova, Liudmila, 61

disintegration of, 203 Zimmerman, Warren, 234

elections in, 225-27, 240n69 Zvornik, 235