Post Wall, Post Square

What made that point transparently clear was the brief instant on 22 December – a rainy Friday afternoon just before the Christmas holiday – when Kohl and Modrow formally opened crossing points at the Brandenburg Gate. Watching the people celebrating the unity of their city, Kohl exclaimed: ‘This is one of the happiest hours of my life.’ For the chancellor at the end of that momentous year – less than a month after his Ten Point speech – Dresden and Berlin were indeed memories to savour.[159]

*

The end of 1989 was not happy for everyone, of course. As the Western world ate its Christmas dinner, TV screens were full of the final moments of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. The absolute ruler of Romania for twenty-four years and his wife were executed by soldiers of the army that, until just a few days before, he had commanded.

Romania was the last country in the Soviet bloc to experience revolutionary change. And it was the only one to suffer large-scale violence in 1989: according to official figures 1,104 people were killed and 3,352 injured.[160] Here alone tanks rolled, as in China, and firing squads took their revenge. This reflected the nature of Ceaușescu’s highly personal and arbitrary dictatorship – the most gruesome in Eastern Europe. Having gone off on his own from Moscow since the mid-1960s, Ceaușescu had also stood apart from Gorbachev’s reformist agenda and peaceful approach to change.

So why, in this repressive police state, had rebellion broken out? Unlike the rest of the bloc, Ceaușescu had managed to pay off almost all of Romania’s foreign debts – but at huge cost to his people: cutting domestic consumption so brutally that shops were left with empty shelves, homes had no heat and electricity was rationed to a few hours a day. Meanwhile, Nicolae and Elena lived in grotesque pomp.

Despite such appalling repression, their fall was triggered not by social protest but by ethnic tensions. Romania had a substantial Hungarian minority, some 2 million out of a population of 23 million, who were treated as second-class citizens. The flashpoint was the western town of Timişoara where the local pastor and human-rights activist László To˝kés was to be evicted. Over the weekend of 17–18 December some 10,000 people demonstrated in his support, shouting ‘Freedom’, ‘Romanians rise up’, ‘Down with Ceaușescu!’ The regime’s security forces (the Securitate) and army units responded with water cannons, tear gas and gunfire. Sixty unarmed civilians were killed.[161]

Protest now spread through the country as people took to the streets, emboldened by the examples of Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The regime hit back and there were lurid reports of perhaps 2,000 deaths. On 19 December, the day Kohl was in Dresden, Washington and Moscow independently condemned the ‘brutal violence’.[162]

In Bucharest, Ceaușescu, totally out of touch with reality, sought to quell the chaos through a big address to a mass crowd on 21 December, which was also relayed to his country and the world on television. But his show of defiance was hollow. On the balcony of the presidential palace, the great dictator, now seventy-one, looked old, frail, perplexed, rattled – indeed suddenly fallible. Sensing this, the crowd interrupted his halting speech with catcalls, boos and whistles – at one point silencing him for three minutes. The spell had clearly been broken. As soldiers and even some of the Securitate men fraternised with the protestors in the streets, the regime began to implode. Next morning the Ceaușescus were whisked away from the palace roof by helicopter, but they were soon caught, tried by a kangaroo court and shot – or rather, mown down in a fusillade of more than a hundred bullets. Their blood-soaked bodies were then displayed to the eager cameramen.[163]

But Romania was 1989’s exception. Everywhere else, regime change had occurred in a remarkably peaceful way. In neighbouring Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov – who boasted thirty-five years in power, longer than anyone else in the bloc – had been toppled on 10 November. Yet the world hardly seemed to notice because the media was mesmerised by the fall of the Wall the night before. In any case, this was simply a palace coup: Zhivkov was replaced by his foreign minister Petar Mladenov. It was only gradually that people power made itself felt. The first street demonstrations in the capital, Sofia, began more than a week later on 18 November, with demands for democracy and free elections. On 7 December, the disparate opposition groups congealed as the so-called Union of Democratic Forces. Under pressure, the authorities decided to make further concessions: Mladenov announced on the 11th that the Communist Party would abandon its monopoly on power and multiparty elections would be held the following spring. Yet the sudden ousting of Zhivkov did not produce any fundamental transfer of power to the people, as in Poland, or a radical reform programme, as in Hungary. Hence the preferred Bulgarian term for 1989: ‘The Change’ (promianata). In a few weeks, the veritable dinosaur of the Warsaw Pact had been quietly consigned to history.[164]

Most emblematic of the national revolutions of 1989 was Czechoslovakia. The Czechs witnessed the GDR’s collapse first-hand, as the candy-coloured Trabis chugged through their countryside and the refugees flooded into Prague.

Driving to freedom: Trabis in Czechoslovakia

But their own communist elite had an uncompromisingly hardline reputation and so change came late to Czechoslovakia. Indeed, Miloš Jakeš, the party leader, had rejected any moves for reform from above, as in Hungary and Poland. Yet there was context. Memories of 1968 – only two decades earlier – were still vivid and painful. But then they were galvanised by the scenes at the Berlin Wall on 9–10 November. A week later, on the 17th, the commemoration for a Czech student murdered by the Nazis fifty years before, rapidly escalated into a demonstration against the regime which the police broke up with force. This was the spark. Every day for the next week, the student protests mushroomed – drawing in intellectuals, dissidents and workers and spreading across the country. By the 19th the opposition groups in Prague had formed a ‘Civic Forum’ (in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the movement was called ‘Public against Violence’) and by the 24th they were in talks with the communist government – which was now dominated by moderates after the old guard around Jakeš had resigned. The two key opposition figures – each in his own way deeply symbolic – were the writer Václav Havel, recently released from imprisonment for dissident activities as a key member of the Charter 77 organisation – and the Slovak Alexander Dubček, leader of the Prague Spring in 1968. The formal round-table negotiations took place on 8 and 9 December. The following day President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communis government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and then stepped down.[165]

The pace of change had been breathtaking. On the evening of 23 November Timothy Garton Ash – who had witnessed Poland’s upheavals in June and then the start of Czechoslovakia’s revolution – was chatting to Havel over a beer in the basement of Havel’s favourite pub. The British journalist joked: ‘In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks; perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!’ Havel grasped his hand, smiling that famous winning smile, summoned a video team who happened to be drinking in the corner, and asked Garton Ash to say it again, on camera. ‘It would be fabulous, if it could be so,’ sighed Havel.[166] His scepticism was not unwarranted. Admittedly the revolution took twenty-four days not ten, but on 29 December Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly in the hallowed halls of Prague Castle.

The playwright becomes president: Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution in Prague

Although this was for the moment a transitional government – free elections would not be held until June 1990 – the transformation was truly profound. This had been a ‘Velvet Revolution’: smooth and swift, on occasion even merry. By comparison with Poland, Hungary and GDR, opposition politics in Prague had been improvised by amateurs – but they had been able to learn from the mistakes of the others, as well as from their successes. And what’s more, revolution in Czechoslovakia came without the pain of deepening economic crisis, with which the new governments in Warsaw and Budapest had to grapple. And so by the New Year, Czechoslovakia found itself firmly on the road towards political democracy and a market economy.[167]

So much had changed in only two months. At the start of November 1989, it was still possible in Eastern Europe to imagine a future for communism, albeit in a reformed state. But within weeks no one could doubt that it was in irreversible decline. And by the end of the year ‘those who had come too late’, as Gorbachev put it in East Berlin, had most certainly been punished (Ceaușescu, Zhivkov and Honecker), while those who had never let themselves be silenced (notably Havel and Mazowiecki) had now replaced the leaders they previously denounced.

The fact that Gorbachev presided over these variegated national exits from communism without intervening also allowed Kohl more leeway and gave hope for his mission in 1990: to bring the two Germanies closer to unity. The chancellor set the tone in his New Year message, expressing the aspiration that the coming decade would be ‘the happiest of this century’ for his people – offering ‘the chance of a free and united Germany in a free and united Europe’. That, he said, ‘depended critically on our contribution’. In other words, he was reminding his fellow Germans – so long weighed down by the burden of the past – that they had now been given the opportunity to shape the future.[168]

But the new architecture could not be constructed by Germans alone. With the communist glacier in retreat – indeed melting before one’s eyes – and the ascendant Western Europe opening out, the stark, two-bloc structure of Cold War Europe had cracked asunder. The pieces would now have to be put together in a new mosaic and this would require not merely the consent but also the creative engagement of the superpowers.

In other words, Kohl might have had his problems with Mitterrand and especially Thatcher, but they were mere stumbling blocks. When it came to building a new order around a unifying Germany, this could be achieved only by working with Bush and Gorbachev. Yet both these leaders were deeply preoccupied in late 1989 with their own problems: how belatedly, to create an effective personal rapport after their slow, at times frosty, start. And, more than that, how to manage the delicate business of moving beyond the Cold War in the heart of Europe.

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