No one has yet witnessed a society with nationalized property, a planned economy, and a democratic and pluralistic political structure.
Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, 1985
By 1991 the Cold War was over, the Iron Curtain confined to the past. ‘The end of an era’ is a common cliché. Here, the term is accurate. What happened between 1989 and 1991 was no less than a European revolution – and, amazingly, unlike earlier revolutions it was (largely) free of bloodshed. How was that possible?
Without Mikhail Gorbachev it might not have been. It is possible in retrospect to see the structural reasons behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe. But without Gorbachev there is no reason to presume that the collapse would have come when it did, would have taken the course that it did, or would have had the consequences it did. His role was indispensable.
Even so, another force was necessary to bring about the revolution in Eastern Europe: the power of the people. Emboldened by what they were seeing in the Soviet Union the peoples of Eastern Europe rebelled against the communist masters who had held them in thrall for over forty years. A prelude had taken place in Poland in 1980 when popular opposition to communist rule had led to the formation of the Solidarity movement and had shaken the existing regime to the core. The following year, however, the ruling forces in Poland had struck back. Solidarity was banned, the opposition suppressed, the pressure for change blocked. Once the new wind blew in the Soviet Union in the later 1980s Solidarity was revitalized. In neither Poland nor elsewhere was it expected that the end of communist rule would come quickly. But in late 1989, in an avalanche of change, the existing regimes were overturned. In each country the people sought, and won, their freedom. The revolution from above that Gorbachev had instigated had turned into a revolution from below as the people realized their rulers stood on ground that was trembling. In one country after another, they took power into their own hands. Finally, the change that had commenced there swept back in an unstoppable force over the Soviet Union itself. What had stood, seemingly indomitable, for nearly seventy years, was demolished in two.
Poland, as it had done since 1980, led the way. The elections held on 4 June 1989 brought a landslide victory for Solidarity, which by now had morphed from a trade union – where it was, in fact, much weaker than it had been in 1980 – into, effectively, a political party. The modest turnout of only 62 per cent probably reflected a high degree of mistrust for elections that many believed would change nothing. But the result could not have been plainer. In the first round Solidarity won 92 of the 100 seats in the Senate and 160 of the 161 seats open to it in the Sejm (the lower house of parliament). Mingling with the exhilaration was fear. On the very afternoon of the election television had brought pictures of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing where hundreds of students, demonstrating for democracy, were mown down by government troops. How would the Polish government react to the opposition victory at the polls? In fact, the regime accepted the verdict of the people. Forty years of communist domination were over – almost, but not quite.
Government was still in the hands of the Communists, and General Jaruzelski was duly elected to the new post of Executive President. The second round of voting on 18 June confirmed, however, the rout of the communist establishment. Around 65 per cent of the votes cast went to Solidarity, though at only 25 per cent the turnout was miserably low. Jaruzelski’s offer to Solidarity to participate in a grand coalition was refused. On 7 August Solidarity’s leader, Lech Wałęsa, proposed a government led by Solidarity, backed by smaller parties that had earlier been mere puppets of the Communist Party (by now a minority party in the Sejm). By 24 August Poland had a leading member of Solidarity, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, an intellectual with a long history as a political dissident, as its new Prime Minister – appointed by the communist President Jaruzelski and approved by nearly all the communist deputies in the Sejm. During the following months the foundations of the communist state were systematically dismantled. Poland became simply a republic, no longer a People’s Republic; police and army were depoliticized; the constitution eliminated the leading role of the Communist Party; and the party dissolved itself (re-emerging in January 1990 as the Social Democratic Party). But with the end of the common enemy went any unity among the opposition.
During 1990 pressure built on Jaruzelski to step down as President. But when he did so the leaders of Solidarity belied the name of their movement. The recently re-elected Chairman of Solidarity, Lech Wałęsa, declared his own candidacy, directly challenging Mazowiecki, formerly one of his closest advisors. Impatient for faster change, imperious in manner, but with a sure populist touch that enabled him to give unique voice to the spreading discontent, Wałęsa was resentful at the way he felt the intellectuals in the movement, such as Mazowiecki and Adam Michnik, had sidelined him. Elections in November (with a second round in December) resulted in defeat for the intellectual and overwhelming victory for the electrician and former trade union leader, who was sworn in on 22 December 1990. By this time Solidarity itself had splintered, losing support to new parties that had emerged in the new Polish democracy. Poland was rapidly turning into a recognizable pluralist society. A remarkable political transition had taken place democratically and without bloodshed.
Economically, the early experience of pluralist democracy was less successful. ‘Shock therapy’, known from the name of the new Finance Minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, as the ‘Balcerowicz Plan’, was applied to the state-controlled economy, which from the beginning of 1990 was abruptly opened up to market forces. The swift consequence of extensive deregulation and currency devaluation was soaring inflation. Exports rose while those of other parts of Eastern Europe languished. But by the time of Wałęsa’s election as President the rate of inflation had reached nearly 250 per cent, there was nothing to buy in the shops, production had fallen drastically, and there was a sharp rise in unemployment. Average real incomes dropped by a third. Relief of much of the debt to foreign countries and stringent conditions for support from the International Monetary Fund gradually formed the basis of economic recovery over subsequent years. By then the privatization of Poland’s economy was well under way. In economics as well as in politics, Poland was fast learning what it meant to be a ‘Western’ country.
On 16 June 1989, less than a fortnight after the election in Poland that had ushered in the end of communism there, came the Hungarian moment. An enormous crowd, around 200,000 people, had assembled in Heroes’ Square in Budapest for the televised ceremonial reburial of the hero of the 1956 uprising, Imre Nagy – hanged by the communist regime after a farcical show trial in 1956. The previous year police had violently broken up a demonstration to mark the anniversary of Nagy’s execution. Now, a year later, Heroes’ Square was draped no longer with the hammer and sickle banner but with the national flag. The last speaker to pay tribute to Nagy’s memory was Viktor Orbán from the Young Democrats. Orbán drew rapturous applause when he declared: ‘If we can trust our souls and strength, we can put an end to the communist dictatorship.’ The steps to that end followed rapidly, one after the other. And, as in Poland, they proceeded peacefully.
János Kádár, who was responsible for Nagy’s execution, did not live to see the demise of the state that he had presided over for so long, dying of cancer on 6 July 1989. A month earlier the Communist Party had agreed to talks with the Round Table of oppositional groups that had been set up in March. But much of the summer was taken up by disagreements within the oppositional groups, while the Communists – themselves divided – continued to run the government. In a confused and confusing situation, the trajectory was nonetheless plain. Free parliamentary elections were agreed on 18 September, though other aspects of the transition to democracy, especially the question of whether parliamentary elections should precede elections to the presidency, were still matters of dispute among the oppositional groups. Early the following month the Communists dissolved their party and changed its name – officially, it had been the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party – to simply the Hungarian Socialist Party. On 23 October, the anniversary of the 1956 revolution, the new Hungarian Republic – as in Poland, no longer a ‘People’s Republic – was proclaimed to an enormous crowd gathered outside the parliament building in Budapest. The long-delayed parliamentary elections – marking the return to pluralist politics – eventually took place in March and April 1990 and produced an unwieldy coalition of mainly liberal and centre-right conservative parties.
A summer of much inertia followed, during which the economic situation sharply deteriorated. Although Hungary’s economy had for many years been more open to limited forms of private enterprise than any other Soviet-bloc state, and had recently moved further in that direction, full exposure to the vagaries of the market introduced Hungarians to the harsh realities of Western capitalism. But heavy indebtedness to the West and inflation that was threatening to run out of control meant, as in Poland, that there was little alternative to seeking Western support, however difficult the transition might be. IMF financial aid helped Hungary overcome the difficult transition – though only after new austerity measures had been introduced in July 1990. That autumn, too, the government introduced a big programme of privatization. As elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, neo-liberal economic ideas, largely imported from the United States, were dominant. Opinion surveys indicated that by that time there was less public confidence in the recently elected democratic government than there had been in the previous communist administration. Meanwhile, Soviet troops, once numbering around 100,000 in Hungary, were withdrawing, the last of them leaving in March 1991. This was the most visible sign that Hungary had in effect pulled out of the Warsaw Pact and was turning to the West. The decisive moment had in fact already occurred in the summer of 1989.
That August, Hungary had agreed, in return for substantial financial aid from West Germany, to open its border to Austria for East Germans. With this single move Hungary not only turned its back on the obligation to return anyone seeking to leave a fellow socialist country to their land of origin; crucially, it created a hole in the Iron Curtain. When the border was opened, on the night of 10–11 September, thousands of East German citizens voted with their feet, crossing through Hungary into Austria, first into holding camps, then from there into the Federal Republic of Germany. By the end of October 50,000 had left.
They also took refuge in embassies of the Federal Republic in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw. On 30 September 1989 the West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, announced on television that he had successfully negotiated with Moscow and East Berlin to transfer 60,000 GDR citizens to the Federal Republic. Thousands standing on station platforms, and millions more watching on television, jubilantly greeted the sealed trains that transported the refugees west.
Even seasoned observers of the German Democratic Republic had not foreseen such rapid or radical change. GDR leaders themselves were certainly unprepared for it. The East German leader Erich Honecker had recently remarked that he could envisage the Berlin Wall standing in a hundred years’ time. There had, indeed, been a growth in opposition to the regime across the summer, much of it articulated by Protestant pastors. But intellectuals, unlike those in Poland and Hungary, had largely been in the regime’s pocket. Political nonconformism up to this point had posed no great threat to the regime. The regime’s leaders, for their part, showed no willingness to make concessions. Local elections in May 1989 had been blatantly rigged. Party hardliners backed the Chinese massacres of the students in Tiananmen Square; regrettable, but necessary to protect socialism, was the tenor of the justification. And the Stasi – the feared state security service – still retained its vice-like grip over society.
Outwardly, the regime continued to exude confidence. Preparations were in full swing for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR on 7 October. Behind the mask, however, there was mounting panic. There had been an effusive welcome for Gorbachev by cheering crowds as the Soviet leader attended the celebrations in East Berlin. The GDR leaders, above all the utterly intransigent Erich Honecker, could not mistake the huge gulf separating them from Gorbachev. The words that Gorbachev used privately in speaking to the East German leaders were swiftly made public: ‘Life punishes harshly anyone who is left behind in politics.’
Demonstrations against the regime, inspired each Monday evening by prayers for peace in the Church of St Nicholas in Leipzig, had grown in size – a few thousand in early September, around 20,000 a month later, perhaps 70,000 by Monday, 9 October 1989. Two days earlier, during the fortieth anniversary celebrations, the police had acted with their usual brutality against demonstrators. There were public intimations – Tiananmen Square was still in people’s minds – that the security forces would resort to arms against the Monday evening demonstrators in Leipzig. Rumours circulated that the regime was ready to crush the protest by force. A showdown was expected. Kurt Masur, the internationally known conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, was among those – also including three local party functionaries – who led an appeal to avoid violence. It was uncertain whether the appeal would carry weight. Honecker had instructed the Stasi on 8 October to prevent any disturbances. That sounded ominous. Then Moscow intervened: there must be no bloodshed in Leipzig. The message got through to the party and police in the city. Even so, demonstrators could not be sure. They had to reckon with the possibility that the police might use live ammunition against them. To march that evening took courage. In the event, the demonstration passed off peacefully. It was a decisive moment. People realized that the police would no longer intervene, that it was safe to demonstrate. On 4 November around half a million citizens took part in a vast demonstration, broadcast live on television, in Alexanderplatz in the centre of East Berlin. They demanded free elections, free expression, resignation of the government, legalization of oppositional groups, and the end of the communist claim to leadership of the country. ‘We are the people,’ they chanted.
The revolt of the masses was about to reach its climax. On 3 October, smarting from the embarrassing scenes of East German refugees fleeing to the West, the GDR authorities had banned travel to Czechoslovakia without a visa. The route to Hungary was thereby closed off. But as the protests against the regime grew, it became impossible to sustain this highly unpopular measure, which effectively walled in the entire population. On 1 November the restriction was withdrawn. Between 3 and 5 November more than 10,000 citizens crossed the Czech border, en route into West Germany. With this effective permission to depart for the West, showing only a passport, the Berlin Wall had actually become pointless. However, leaving the GDR still meant completing cumbersome formalities to explain the reason for any journey. In any case, the Wall still stood – though not for much longer.
Travel restriction had been a major cause of grievance. By 9 November the regime had prepared a decree, to be made public the following day, permanently permitting travel on all routes directly into the Federal Republic, and into West Berlin, without any formality. The party’s newly appointed media representative, Günter Schabowski, had evidently not digested the content of the new directive that had just been passed to him when he proceeded to read it out at the press conference that evening, 9 November. When journalists asked him when the directive would become effective, he replied without hesitation: ‘Immediately, straightaway.’ Further questioned, he said this also applied to Berlin. At this, thousands of GDR citizens, who had been watching keenly on television with growing amazement, jumped into their Trabants, Ladas and Wartburgs and simply headed for the Wall. By mid-evening there were huge throngs at all the Berlin border-crossings, pressing to enter West Berlin. The border guards, for decades such a menacing presence, uninformed of any change, tried at first to prevent people leaving, then they attempted to stamp passports to indicate that the holders were leaving the GDR and not coming back. But, completely overwhelmed, they soon gave up wondering what they were expected to do. Left sometimes with lipstick on their cheeks and their hats askew, they simply waved the masses through. ‘Freedom at last,’ some shouted.
West Berliners also rushed with frenzied jubilation to their side of the Wall. They were soon singing, dancing, embracing strangers, plying their euphoric but still bewildered fellow Germans from the east with flowers, chocolates – and bananas (like all fresh fruits not readily available in the GDR). Next day border guards lined the Wall. They were soon replaced, however, by thousands of young people who clambered on top of what had for nearly thirty years been a symbol of division and suppression.* Bits of the Wall were chiselled out – as souvenirs, but also as destruction of a hated monument to tyranny. The next days were one long party in West Berlin. Crowds of Berliners, from east and west, milled around the city centre. A Coca-Cola regional executive was soon afterwards rewarded with quick promotion for his initiative in ordering cans of Coke to be handed to the East Germans entering West Berlin, ensuring that his product had massive free advertising exposure on television. The Underground was at times so full that trains went through stations without stopping. Banks opened exceptionally on the Saturday morning to dole out the ‘welcome money’ of 100 German marks. East Germans had no difficulty in spending it. Starved for so long of Western consumer commodities, they could often be seen carrying newly bought ghetto-blasters along with bunches of bananas or bags of oranges.
By then the East German regime was plainly on its last legs. The shambolic way in which the opening of the Wall had taken place showed a government no longer in control. Without the option of Soviet backing for maintaining power through military force against its citizens the regime was effectively powerless. And had it used force it would have lost all prospect of financial aid from West Germany, without which its economy would have struggled to survive. As it was, its political disintegration was imminent. Honecker had already on 18 October been deposed from all his party and state offices – officially on health grounds. But his successor, Egon Krenz, a somewhat sinister-looking arch-apparatchik, had been a close acolyte of the deposed leader and was cut from the same cloth, down to defending the Tiananmen Square massacres. His attempts to pose as a new-model reformer were doomed from the start. By early November most of the other GDR leaders, including Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi, had gone. (The dismantling of the organizational framework of the Stasi quickly followed.) On 2 December the crucial clause in the East German constitution, declaring the GDR a socialist state run by the communist Socialist Unity Party was removed. Krenz, and the rest of the Politburo and Central Committee of the Party, resigned two days later. By 6 December Krenz had also quit his position as head of state. The power of the people had by then ensured that the GDR was well on its way – confused though the path would remain for some months – to the full embrace of pluralist democracy. The people’s peaceful revolution – thanks to their own courage, but in no small measure, too, to the external backing of Gorbachev – had triumphed.
The opposition groups – New Forum, Democratic Awakening, Democracy Now, and many others (around 300 to 325 in all, though most of them with no more than around twenty members) – that had sprung up during the summer and autumn of 1989 had spearheaded the revolution. They all wanted democracy, with free elections as a start. Beyond that their leaders, many of them intellectuals or idealists whose principles were rooted in their Protestant faith, naturally enough often differed in their precise objectives – in so far as they had these. Unsurprisingly there was much uncertainty. They wanted to be rid of the oppressive state communism that they had all experienced. And there was intense anger among the swelling masses of their supporters at the corruption of the leaders who had preached socialist equality but enjoyed luxuries and privileges that were a gross abuse of power and a betrayal of the sacrifices they demanded of those who had trusted them. ‘Real existing socialism’ was seen to have been a lie. But there were many still idealistic communists among the protesters, including some who had been party members. None of the leading advocates of radical change looked to Western capitalism as a model. Nor did they want unification with capitalist West Germany.
These views mirrored those of East Germans generally. According to opinion surveys soon after the opening of the Wall, 86 per cent of the population favoured ‘a path towards a better, reformed socialism’. They harboured hopes, soon to be proved illusory, of a ‘third way’ – something like the type of ‘socialism with a human face’ that had been crushed by Soviet force in Prague in 1968. They were soon finding, however, that their hopes were being overtaken by rapidly growing demands by ordinary people for precisely that which they had not at first sought: unification with West Germany and the satisfaction of their desire for consumer commodities that they briefly glimpsed on their short stays in West Berlin. Where the cry in the autumn had been ‘we are the people’, it was by the end of the year changing to ‘we are one people’. Even more striking was the new slogan catching on: ‘United German Fatherland’. Surveys showed that just below 80 per cent of the East German population now wanted unification. Popular pressure was starting to build up, alongside diplomatic initiatives among political leaders, that would within months culminate in German unification.
The opening of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic moment that told the world the Soviet bloc was finished. Already, the other dominos were tumbling. The end of the remaining communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania came quickly – though in each case, unlike Poland and Hungary, those in power were not ready to yield it.
Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, at their head Václav Havel, and backed by large numbers of students, had for months become more vociferous in their opposition to the regime. Some 10,000 people had demonstrated on 28 October 1989 on the anniversary of the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. A petition put together by Havel (who had been released from prison in May) and a number of associates, entitled ‘A Few Sentences’, seeking the introduction of democratic rights, attracted around 37,000 signatories by November. The pressure for change mounted rapidly. The dramatic events in the West German Embassy in Prague showed that change was possible, and on the way. The fall of the Wall was its most spectacular manifestation. But the regime in Czechoslovakia was not ready to capitulate. Riot police wielding truncheons brutally attacked student demonstrators on 17 November. Far from deterring the demonstrators, the police violence encouraged further, much larger demonstrations. Within days the numbers of demonstrators demanding an end to the communist dictatorship had swollen to 200,000. By 24 November three-quarters of a million protesters assembled in Wenceslas Square. Half of the country’s workforce supported the two-day general strike that followed. Opposition groups had meanwhile, on 19 November, organized themselves in a ‘Civic Forum’, led by Havel, to demand democratic change. The discussions in its headquarters, the bowels of Prague’s Magic Lantern Theatre, were often inchoate, rambling and confused. But, both prompting and also being driven by the huge popular groundswell of opposition, the Civic Forum orchestrated the ‘velvet revolution’ that swept away the tottering remnants of communist rule.
Before the end of November the entire party leadership resigned and the party’s pre-eminent position was erased from the constitution. The government tried, in a major reshuffle on 3 December, to keep control in the hands of the communists. It was too late for that. Threatened with a general strike a new cabinet, most of whose members were drawn from Civic Forum, was sworn in on 10 December. The great survivor from 1968 and embodiment of the old regime, the President, Gustáv Husák, at last conceded defeat and resigned. On 29 December 1989, just before the end of a year so rich in momentous events, Václav Havel took the oath as the new head of state. In a profoundly symbolic move the hero of 1968, Alexander Dubček, had been appointed a day earlier to the essentially honorific position as Chairman of the Federal Assembly. Soviet troops began withdrawing from Czechoslovakia in late February 1990. Elections in June 1990 (and Havel’s re-election as President the following month) confirmed Czechoslovakia’s successful transition to a liberal democracy.
The basis of a ‘civic society’, which developed in the interstices of communist rule its own forms of pluralist political thinking and debate in opposition to the party’s monopoly of power, scarcely existed in Bulgaria. So the breakthrough came not from below but from above, through a coup d’état within the party leadership. Popular pressure for democracy followed, rather than preceded, change at the top. Todor Zhivkov’s belated attempt in November 1989 to head off his critics in the party leadership by purporting to embrace reform was to no avail. Eastern Europe’s most long-standing party leader, who had come to power only a year after Stalin’s death, was toppled from within, forced out of his party and state offices on 10 November 1989. The man who metaphorically wielded the knife, and Zhivkov’s successor as party boss, Petăr Mladenov, was, however, himself a member of the old guard, had served as Foreign Minister since 1971, and, as it later transpired, had as late as December 1989 considered turning tanks on demonstrators. He himself would be ousted as head of state in July 1990.
Before then, nonetheless, as Gorbachev had initially done in the Soviet Union, Mladenov introduced the first substantial reforms as a long overdue step towards (as he hoped) sustaining, not breaking, communist power. He was prepared by late December 1989 to enter negotiations about a programme of reform with oppositional groups, several of which had earlier that month come together as the Union of Democratic Forces. Transformation of the state took place over 1990. It was far less dramatic, more laboured, and more piecemeal than in the other former eastern bloc countries. But it was no more stoppable. Party and state were formally separated in January; in March strikes were made legal; the Communist Party restyled itself the Bulgarian Socialist Party in April; and elections were held in June, when, however, the former Communists won the largest share of the vote (47.2 per cent). Weak coalition government, divided in its views about how to cope with seriously mounting economic problems amid widespread unrest, staggered on through the second half of 1990. An end began to come into view only after a non-party lawyer, Dimitar Popov, had agreed on 7 December 1990 to form a provisional government on the basis of an Agreement Guaranteeing a Peaceful Transition to Democratic Society made by the three largest parties. Rebuilding the shattered economy – as elsewhere, backed by support from the IMF and the World Bank, and on the basis of market reforms and privatization – could only now begin in earnest, though recovery was slow to take effect.
In five of the six countries in the Soviet bloc the revolution in 1989 was astonishingly peaceful. The regimes had at first either used violent means, or at least contemplated using them, but had been deterred by the realization that they would not be backed by the Soviet Union. The ‘Gorbachev factor’ was decisive. Regime leaders had then tried to placate the population by belated and piecemeal attempts at reform, actually with the aim of retaining power. But popular opposition, realizing that, without Soviet backing, the leaders of their countries were as exposed as the emperor with no clothes, had been increasingly emboldened to voice their demands for democratic change. The power of the people grew exponentially in the autumn of 1989. The leaders of the communist regimes were discredited, exposed and increasingly helpless.
But if peaceful revolution was the normal pattern, in one country the regime came to a violent end. It was predictable that if the balloon were to go up with a bang anywhere, it was likely to be in Romania. The monstrosity of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s tyranny ruled out negotiation, compromise, gradual reform and peaceful transition, such as took place elsewhere. Opposition, activated by the climate of change inaugurated by Gorbachev, was certainly stirring beneath the surface. But it had little impact until late autumn 1989 in the face of continued harsh repression and brutality by the regime. Revolutionary change in neighbouring Hungary encouraged the opposition in Romania, though the regime responded by erecting a wire fence in the summer of 1989 to prevent an exodus across the Hungarian border – 20,000 had left since 1987.
For weeks the regime seemed to be weathering the storm that had swept across the rest of Central Europe. The deluge began to overtake Romania, however, on 12 December 1989. On that date the state police, the feared Securitate, tried to deport a priest, Lászlo Tökés – for some time a thorn in the side of the regime – across the Hungarian border from the city of Timişoara in western Romania, but found their action blocked by hundreds of protesters. Over the following days the protest escalated dramatically. The regime responded in the way it knew best – by resorting to extreme violence. On 17 December the army fired shots into a crowd, killing several protesters. But despite the violence, by now the protest was gaining unstoppable momentum. When Ceauşescu, returning prematurely from a visit to Iran, addressed a rally in the centre of Bucharest at lunchtime on 21 December, the television coverage had to be broken off. Instead of the usual rapturous applause of organized claques, the unthinkable happened. The ‘Leader’ was booed and whistled. That evening the army, militia and Securitate used truncheons, water cannon and live fire against a huge crowd but failed to quell what had by now escalated into a full-blown revolution.
Ceauşescu was again forced to retreat from a hostile crowd, which he had tried to address from the balcony of party headquarters on the morning of 22 December. Fearing that the crowd was about to storm the building, Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, were airlifted from the roof by helicopter. Their hopes of a safe refuge, however, proved short-lived. They were arrested that evening not far away in Târgovişte in southern Romania by units of the army, now responding to the orders of the National Salvation Front that had seized power in Bucharest. On Christmas Day the Ceauşescus were peremptorily sentenced to death by a rapidly improvised court martial, taken outside and executed by a firing squad. Only once the death of the former dictator became known did the violence that had continued for five days and cost over a thousand lives subside. Overall it has been estimated that around 10,000 people were killed during the Romanian revolution.
In Romania there was no speedy transition to democracy. A country with a small intelligentsia and middle class – largely bought off by the regime – and an acutely repressive police state was in no position to construct any basis of functioning ‘civil society’, even in clandestine form, until the dictatorship had ended. Unlike Poland or Czechoslovakia there was no government in waiting. Those who now wielded power in the provisional government in Romania had themselves for the most part been members of the former ruling party. They took their opportunity in the chaos of December to grasp the reins hastily dropped by the departing dictator.
At their head, named as provisional head of state, was Ion Iliescu, who had earlier been a prominent member of the Ceauşescu regime. Concessions were made to pluralism. But much of it was little more than a facade. A plethora of new parties took shape; some old parties were reborn. But as elections in May 1990 showed, the new-old guard in the National Salvation Front held all the levers of power. The Securitate infiltrated all the significant avenues of social control. Opposition was met by mob violence – with the police nowhere in sight – deliberately incited by the government against any seen as dissidents, opponents, ‘deviants’ or foreigners. Only slowly, across 1990, did the enormous turbulence in Romania, sustained by unrest fostered by economic misery, begin to settle down. By the end of 1991, Romania finally had a widely approved democratic constitution. State ownership of the economy was by then starting to be opened up to privatization. But the transition to a functioning pluralist political system and to a capitalist economy remained a slow process. Democracy in Romania continued to be a lengthy and imperfect work in progress.
In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania transition to democracy was essentially a matter – apart, of course, from the scarcely negligible factor of loosening the bonds with the Soviet Union – of satisfying the needs of the citizens of those countries. The path to this end was winding and often strewn with thorns. But it took place within established national borders. In all but Czechoslovakia these borders remained unaltered. And even after the subsequent ‘velvet divorce’ in 1993, when Czechoslovakia split into the two states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the external borders remained those of the former united country. Here, too, the transformation from a communist regime to a liberal democracy, dramatic though it was, raised no issues that demanded intervention by international powers to approve and confirm a major alteration to Europe’s geopolitics. That there was no revival of the territorial claims and conflicts – between Germans and Poles, or Hungarians and Romanians, for instance – of the kind that had been so poisonous between the wars itself showed how far Central European borders had become settled since 1945.
The case of the German Democratic Republic was different. As one of two states within the German nation it owed its very existence to the fundamental alternative it offered to its larger and more prosperous capitalist neighbour. Even more crucial: the creation of the two Germanies had been a direct product of the conditions imposed by the victorious Allies at the end of the Second World War. Any change in the status of the GDR, therefore, had major international consequences.
It was barely possible after the opening of the Wall to keep up with the rapidity of the change that was taking place in the GDR, and, above all, in Berlin. The city was still formally divided, still formally controlled by the wartime Allies. In practice, however, it was witnessing by the day changes that in practical terms were ending the city’s division. The oppressive border controls were quickly dismantled (though they were officially abolished only on 1 July 1990). What was left of the Wall began rapidly to disappear. Another symbolic moment came on 22 December 1989, when a huge jubilant crowd cheered Helmut Kohl as he spoke at the reopening of the Brandenburg Gate. For the first time in more than a quarter of a century it became possible to walk beneath the Brandenburg Gate, the emblem of Berlin, which until then had stood just to the east of the Wall and, surrounded by its ‘death strip’, had epitomized the division of the city. Crowds of people passed through the Gate in pouring rain that night and progressed in festive spirits down the beautiful boulevard, Unter den Linden, into the heart of East Berlin. In the capitalist West dozens of street vendors would have rapidly materialized to set up their stalls and take advantage of the readiness of the throngs of people to part with their money. But in East Berlin there was a dearth of stalls, cafés or pubs open on Unter den Linden. Celebrations of the first walk under the Brandenburg Gate remained necessarily sober. To move from the Kurfürstendamm, the main shopping boulevard in West Berlin, to Unter den Linden in the east was still to move between two economically separate systems. But this, too, was quickly changing.
The economic imbalance between the two parts of what had once been the same country was a decisive factor. It had been there before the Wall was built, when the drain of labour to the prospering West Germany could not be countered, short of walling in the people of the German Democratic Republic. The material allure of the West had then for nearly thirty years been out of reach, though increasingly visible as West German television programmes advertising the attractions of Western consumerism became accessible to much of the East German population. The opening of the Wall now meant that citizens of the GDR could, at least in theory, begin to take advantage of the far greater prosperity of West Germany. And the swelling chorus of ‘German, united fatherland’ by East German protesters had indicated that most of them did not see West Germany as a foreign country; that they felt an identity with the people of the larger, western part of what had in living memory (at least of older citizens) been a single country. Among West Germans this feeling was even stronger. Already according to opinion surveys in late November 1989, 60 per cent of East Germans but 70 per cent of West Germans favoured reunification.
East Germans remained, however, poor by Western standards. Their currency, the (East) mark, would buy them little or nothing in the West. And their ‘welcome money’ of a hundred (Western) marks was soon gone. As long as the value of the East German currency remained unaltered it would be impossible to improve the standard of living of the population, or to rebuild the structural foundations of a rotted economy. But any alteration depended upon the relationship between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. Political change had to precede economic restructuring. Momentous decisions were necessary. And this meant involvement of the former wartime Allies. The stance of the post-war superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union (most especially the latter), was a critical element in a highly complex equation.
Still, the decisive role was played by the Germans themselves. The key initiatives came from West Germany – in particular from the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, a politician who seemed constantly to be underrated, but who played a major personal role in the transformation of his own country, and of Europe too. Neither Kohl nor anyone else had thought of speedy unification even after the opening of the Wall necessarily called for a new basis of relations between the two German states. Nor, once the prospect of unification emerged, was it imagined that it would happen so rapidly. What followed was unexpected. It took Kohl, too, by surprise. But he, more quickly than others, saw and acted upon the opportunities. He was pushed along by the tide of events. But he surfed that tide, diverting the waters – at times against weighty advice – into channels that flowed only in one direction.
The East German government at first wanted nothing to do with thoughts of unification. The newly appointed Prime Minister, Hans Modrow, a moderate reformer who had earlier been party leader in the Dresden district, rejected outright what he described on 17 November 1989 as ‘unrealistic and dangerous speculation’ about unification. He favoured what he called a ‘contractual community’ between the two German states. Whatever it meant, this term did not last long. It was subsumed by 28 November in a new term, ‘federation’, which Helmut Kohl used in a speech to the Bundestag, outlining a ‘ten-point plan’ to develop ways towards German unity. He did not even tell his own cabinet what he was going to say. He indicated areas of close cooperation, resting on the precondition of democratization in the GDR. He emphasized that any fundamental transformation in relations between the two countries had to fit ‘the future architecture of Europe as a whole’, ending by stating that the political aim of the Federal government remained ‘reunification’ – the return of Germany to a single state. But that was no more than a reiteration of what had been the West German aspiration ever since Germany had been divided. Kohl was still in early December implying that even the ‘federation’ that he had spoken of in his ‘Ten Points’ would take years to mature. During the course of December, however, it became ever clearer that popular pressure in both West and East Germany was driving a rapidly accelerating process towards unification that Kohl was happy to steer and that other European leaders could, even where they wished to, do little to prevent.
‘I love Germany so much that I’m glad there are two of them’ – the old saying of the French writer François Mauriac – was a thought that must have crossed the minds of more than one politician during those days. At any rate, the prospect of unification at first caused much consternation among Western European leaders, and also, unsurprisingly, in Moscow. Only President George Bush, the successor to Ronald Reagan in 1989, spoke from the outset in positive terms about the prospect of early German unification, as long as the new united Germany remained within NATO. But precisely such a notion alarmed Moscow and prompted initial sharp rejection of any idea of unification.
A summit meeting of Bush and Gorbachev held in stormy seas on board a Soviet ship off the coast of Malta on 2–3 December 1989 produced a highly welcome agreement to build upon good relations and cooperation between the two superpowers. The meeting of the superpower leaders was momentous in marking the symbolic end of the Cold War. But in their news conference neither leader held out expectation of early moves to German unification. ‘Any artificial acceleration’ of the process of unification, stated Gorbachev, would hinder change in Eastern Europe (indirectly referring to the still sensitive question, especially in the eyes of those who had been expelled from the former East German provinces, subsequently part of Poland, of whether the Oder–Neisse line, established by Soviet fiat back in 1945, should remain the eastern border of Germany). Bush, despite his private acceptance of German unification, hinted for his part that ‘a concept of permanent borders’ still existed – a comment capable of differing interpretation, but seemingly suggestive of retaining the territorial status quo, by implication within Germany itself.
Over the following days Mitterrand and the prime ministers of Italy and the United Kingdom, Giulio Andreotti and Margaret Thatcher, continued to voice their opposition to German unification – Mrs Thatcher more stridently than anyone – as did the Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers. At a meeting with Thatcher in early September 1989, Mitterrand had argued that, following unification, only the European Union with a common currency could contain the power of an enlarged, more populous Germany, which would be substantially bigger than any other Western European country. Mrs Thatcher replied that it would be ‘insufferable’ to have both German unification and a single currency. For her, and for some other British politicians of her generation, the Second World War had been fought to destroy German power. Unification threatened to revive it. Other European leaders were more open to the prospect of German unification, as long as existing frontiers (beyond the inner-German border) and security arrangements were guaranteed. With this prerequisite, they took the view that it was hard to argue against national unity, should that be the freely determined will of the people of both parts of the divided country.
The breakthrough came, as in a sense it had to, in the basis of agreement between the two countries that had from the beginning formed the core of the moves towards European integration, France and West Germany. When Mitterrand and Kohl met at the Strasbourg conference of leaders of the European Community on 8–9 December 1989, agreement seemed unlikely. Mitterrand, like other European leaders, had been taken aback by Kohl’s peremptory announcement, without consultation, of his Ten-Point Plan just over a week earlier. Unification was a sensitive topic. Anxieties among the European leaders were evident. Kohl did much to defuse the situation by confirming that German unification would be embedded in further moves towards European integration. The Chancellor declared his readiness to take practical steps in a conference of heads of government before the end of 1990 to meet President Mitterrand’s wish to move towards European economic and currency union. By April 1990 Mitterrand and Kohl had even reached agreement on an ambitious plan to convert the European Community into a European union with a political identity by 1 January 1993 (though this would fall well short of the fully fledged political union that Kohl was willing to establish).
Mitterrand was anxious to bind Germany into an integrated Western Europe. Kohl, a true disciple of Adenauer, saw the obvious advantage for Germany in continuing to be bound in to the West, both to defuse any international tensions and to head off any incipient German nationalist revisionist tendencies. As the price and in order to bring about European currency union he was even prepared to sacrifice the Deutsche Mark (D-Mark, DM), the very symbol of West Germany’s post-war prosperity and economic standing.
Events now, east and west, carried Kohl, Modrow and the leaders of all the major powers along in their wake and soon ensured that unification would be a proximate goal not a distant dream. A sign of the pressure building from below was the tumultuous reception that Kohl received from a huge crowd that gathered in the centre of Dresden on 19 December 1989 to hear him and Modrow speak. It was not the nebulous idea of a ‘contractual community’ that set the crowd alight. What did so was the prospect of unification. ‘Germany united fatherland,’ the crowd shouted, amid a sea of West German flags. Kohl responded by declaring his aim to be, ‘if the historic hour permits it, the unity of our nation’. The Chancellor left Dresden convinced that this ‘historic hour’ was now close.
Signs of irreversible collapse in the German Democratic Republic were by this time plain to see. In the first days of December the clause upholding the leading role of the Socialist Unity Party (the East German Communist Party) was struck from the constitution, Erich Honecker and other former prominent figures in the regime were expelled from the party (and charged with corruption and misuse of power), the Politburo resigned en masse, and the subordinate, only nominally independent, parties aligned themselves with the western Christian Union and Free Democrat parties. A newly formed East German Social Democratic Party entered similarly into close cooperation with its West German sister party. Elections to a newly constituted pluralist parliament were envisaged for May 1991, though eventually, under the pressure of events, they were brought forward to March. Meanwhile, a sizeable exodus from the terminally stricken state was under way. Nearly 120,000 East Germans left for the West between the opening of the Wall and the end of 1989.
By the end of January 1990 Gorbachev, following a meeting in Moscow with Modrow, had changed his mind on German unification. This was decisive. President Bush had essentially been in favour from the beginning. But Gorbachev faced different sensitivities in his own country, which had suffered so grievously and so recently at the hands of a united Germany. A united Germany would inevitably once more look eastwards as well as to Western Europe. So for the Soviet leader to embrace the idea of German unification required an act of political courage. From now on, even so, Gorbachev acknowledged the right of Germans, east and west, to come together as a single state. Modrow’s own report on the situation within East Germany had changed Gorbachev’s mind. The great majority of the population simply no longer supported the idea of two German states, the East German leader told Gorbachev. The pressure in favour of unification was so strong that it was impossible to preserve the German Democratic Republic. ‘If we do not take the initiative now’, Gorbachev recalled Modrow saying, ‘the process will become uncontrollable and we won’t be able to influence developments in any way.’ Gorbachev concurred. He and his closest advisors had already reached the same conclusion: ‘German unification should be regarded as inevitable.’
The by now realistic prospect of early unification again raised the obvious question of whether a newly unified Germany could belong to NATO. The Soviet Union had earlier rejected such a notion outright. This remained Gorbachev’s position in February 1990. But circumstances were changing fast. This was the most important single issue. It dominated diplomatic negotiations that month. The formula of 2+4 – the two German states and the four former occupying powers – was agreed as the basis for the negotiations. Britain and France more or less made up the numbers in these negotiations. So did the East Germans. The main players were the Federal Republic, the United States and the Soviet Union. The key actors were Kohl and Gorbachev, with an important though lesser role played by Bush.
The East Germans wanted military neutrality for both parts of Germany as they moved towards a federation. There was no question of that in the eyes of the Western former occupying powers. At first, there was general acceptance among the Western powers of the suggestion, first made by the German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich-Genscher, that NATO would continue, as currently, to have bases in the Federal Republic but they would not be extended to the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. This, according to Gorbachev’s recollection, was categorically stated as the American position by the US Secretary of State, James Baker, when he visited Moscow on 9 February. Gorbachev was still not ready to concede even this arrangement. Towards the end of February, however, the Americans changed their tune (though it was almost certainly what they had wanted all along) and now insisted – in agreement with Chancellor Kohl – that NATO had after all to be extended to former GDR territory if the security of Germany as a whole were to be guaranteed. While, it is true, there had been no earlier formal promise not to extend NATO, the alteration nevertheless explicitly contradicted an earlier understanding on all sides. It later prompted ill-feeling in Russia (and also to some extent in Western Europe) – a sense that the West had not acted in good faith and had reneged on its promises.
The reality in any event was that Gorbachev, still not expecting the rapid collapse of the Warsaw Pact, had been completely outmanoeuvred. In May 1990 he conceded under American pressure that a united Germany should choose for itself which alliance it wished to join. It was a move that the Soviet Union before Gorbachev could never have contemplated, let alone accepted. That Gorbachev now did so was an indication not just of his own unique contribution to the process of German, and European, transformation, but also of the rapid weakening of the Soviet Union. The Soviet economy urgently needed Western financial aid. Germany was ready to offer the required financial credits in return for Soviet cooperation over reunification.
That a united Germany would be free to belong to NATO was confirmed, and became public Soviet policy, when Kohl visited Moscow in July 1990. In return the Soviet Union was given guarantees that Germany would forever renounce possession of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons and would retain no more than 370,000 men under arms. There was also the little matter of covering the cost of Soviet troop withdrawal from the territory of the GDR and relocation to the Soviet Union – an expensive bill of DM 12 billion with a further DM 3 billion credit, which Kohl, after much haggling with Gorbachev on the telephone in September 1990, eventually agreed to pay. For Kohl it was a settlement that he could scarcely have dreamed of only a few months earlier. For Gorbachev it amounted to a deal to cement long-term good relations between the Soviet Union and Germany, which he saw as crucial for Europe’s future. For Gorbachev’s enemies at home – who were rapidly increasing in number – it was an unforgivable betrayal of the interests of the Soviet Union.
The other sensitive issue that lingered over the 2+4 negotiations was that of the East German border. The Federal Republic had never formally abandoned the ultimate aim – however unrealistic it had become – of a return to the borders of 1937 (which included western parts of what had become post-war Poland). The representatives of the ethnic German population who had been forced to flee or had been expelled from those provinces just before and after the end of the war had formed a substantial lobby, mainly within the parties of the Christian Union, which could not be ignored. And there had been no international treaty, as had been the case in 1919, to bring the war to a formal end – and to confirm the Polish western border. As late as July 1989 the West German Finance Minister, Theo Waigel, had told a big rally of Silesian expellees that in his view the lost eastern provinces beyond the Oder–Neisse Line were still part of the ‘German Question’. This represented the view of a small minority. By this stage, in fact, 90 per cent of West Germans accepted this line as a permanent frontier. But in order to placate the expellee lobby Kohl himself remained until the spring of 1990 evasive on this issue. Eventually, on Genscher’s initiative, the matter was addressed in early March when the West German parliament, the Bundestag, solemnly renounced any claim to the former eastern provinces and confirmed the East German border as the Oder–Neisse Line – to be ratified later (and finally accomplished in October 1991) in a treaty between Poland and a government representing the whole of Germany.
Unification was by this time emerging as an imminent likelihood. Not much earlier still viewed as a mid-range prospect at best, the time frame had shrunk visibly under the pressure of events. West German strength and East German weakness were now proving so evident that the eventual outcome was no longer in doubt. The Federal Republic was already exerting gravitational pull. It took overt economic form. In mid-February 1990 it was made plain that the Federal Republic would no longer provide financial aid to the GDR. Without that aid the East German economy, already moribund, was doomed. At much the same time Kohl persuaded his government to endorse a currency union with the GDR. In other words, despite the evident huge disparity in economic strength between the two states, the West German D-Mark would become the currency in both.
A currency union on these terms contained self-evident risks and entailed major economic disadvantages. The West Germans would be bailing out indefinitely at inestimable but doubtless enormous cost an effectively bankrupt East German economy. From the opposing perspective, there would be drastic economic and social effects. Many East Germans would lose their jobs as wholly inefficient state-run industries were closed down. (Industrial output indeed fell by an astonishing 51 per cent between August 1989 and August 1990.) Those favouring a generous exchange ratio of the D-Mark to the East Mark of 1:1 ratio were mainly in the ranks of the Social Democrats and trade unions. The expert advice, from the Bundesbank and Kohl’s Finance Minister, Theo Waigel, was that a 2:1 ratio was necessary to avoid destroying any prospect of competitiveness from the East German economy and inflicting a heavy burden on West Germany’s finances. Kohl had at first agreed. But politics had primacy. With an election looming in the autumn and his popularity sagging in the Federal Republic but soaring in the east, the Chancellor came to see the advantages of bowing to the pressure to agree to the 1:1 ratio. Politically, it was an irresistible proposition.
West Germany was by this time making all the running. On 8 March the government decided against dissolving the Basic Law (the Federal constitution of 1949) prior to the creation of an altogether new constitution for a united Germany. Article 146 of the Basic Law had in fact made provision for such an eventuality. Instead, it was determined that the German Democratic Republic would be directly incorporated into the Federal Republic as five new Länder (like the Saarland had been in 1956) under Article 23 of the Basic Law. This was undoubtedly the easiest and quickest route. But it implied a takeover rather than a merger. And indeed, once the dust had settled on unification, complaints began to be heard that the former German Democratic Republic was being treated much like a colony of West Germany. However unjustified, the feeling was in some ways understandable. It became more pronounced with the wholesale dismissal of teachers, scientific researchers, university lecturers, and others in the professional middle classes who were adjudged to have had connections with the Stasi or had otherwise been too closely involved with the East German regime; or when West Germans were brought in to preside over the restructuring of politics and the rebuilding of the economy. Many East Germans came to see themselves as second-class citizens in their own country.
The East German elections to the ‘People’s Chamber’ (the GDR parliament) on 18 March 1990 – brought forward from the original date of 6 May – gave the plebiscitary imprimatur, however, to the West German initiatives and the fast route to unification under Article 23. East Germans voted for the abolition of their own state. The attractiveness of the D-Mark was the decisive factor. West German political leaders – Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher – played major roles in the election campaign. Brandt, in particular, enjoyed enormous personal popularity. The result was nevertheless a triumph for Kohl. It was in truth a triumph for the D-Mark. The conservative ‘Alliance for Germany’ (in effect the newly formed East German manifestation of the Christian Union), which promised the introduction of the D-Mark and rapid unification, won the day with 48 per cent of the popular vote (on a turnout of 93.4 per cent). The Social Democrats lagged behind on 21.9 per cent. The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the Socialist Unity Party (the East German Communist Party), managed only third place with 16.4 per cent – though it gained an impressive 30.2 per cent in East Berlin, the old communist heartland.
With this result any lingering hopes of a ‘third way’ to a better socialism, harboured by many of the intellectuals who had led the popular uprising against the state in the GDR the previous autumn, were dead and buried. The courageous individuals who had spearheaded the protest movements of differing kinds in the autumn of 1989 now felt ignored by the established parties and organizations of West German capitalist liberal democracy. ‘Socialism has not delivered what it promised’ was the lapidary verdict of one worker who doubtless spoke for multitudes as they looked back, often resentfully, at a regime that they felt had betrayed their hopes for four decades. He and millions of others thought they saw the future – and it was not the failed system of Marxist-Leninist socialism they had lived under in East Germany. Prosperous West Germany, with its liberal freedoms but above all its successful economy, was the magnet.
From the March elections in East Germany to unification was a short and fairly straight road. The key step was the establishment of the currency union – meaning the introduction of the West German D-Mark as the only legal currency in both parts of Germany – on 1 July 1990. The agreed exchange rate of 1 East Mark to 1 DM (in fact, the old compulsory official rate at the Berlin border crossing) was an extraordinarily generous arrangement since the true rate was far higher – probably at least 8 to 1 (the earlier black-market exchange rate). It applied to GDR citizens in employment, with pensions or with savings (up to 4,000 marks or 6,000 marks for those over sixty years old). Even larger savings and company debts were exchanged at the rate of two to one. In the short term, those who had savings would now be able to enjoy foreign travel or buy commodities that had earlier been unavailable to them. Within a short time the material trappings of Western life indeed became a novel but increasingly frequent sight in eastern parts of Germany. But for many the cushioned though modest lifestyle provided by the communist system was now abruptly ended, despite massive subsidies from West Germany.
Employment, for instance, had been guaranteed under communism, however unproductive. But employees and their families were now exposed to the vagaries of the market. Within a year three million East Germans were unemployed. And the East German economy was almost wholly uncompetitive. Only about a third of industry was viable without subsidies, according to estimates (which proved optimistic) in May 1990. Thousands of formerly state-owned East German firms were privatized over the following four years. They were first transferred to an agency set up to implement privatization, the Treuhand (‘trust fund’), which took over more than 13,000 companies, employing four million people. Most of the former state-owned companies became subsidiaries of West German firms. But in their current condition many of them were of little value. Sale prices were commensurately low. Making the companies profitable was a slow business. The Treuhand ended up losing more than 250 billion marks. Private investment, almost all of it West German, was sluggish. And it was far from enough. West Germany had to bear much of the financial burden of unification. A colossal investment programme was required. The infrastructure – including roads, railway, bridges, also a dilapidated telephone system – needed urgent renovation. In addition, there were the huge social costs of unemployment pay and welfare provision. The German government spent an estimated 350 billion marks (nearly £120 billion at the exchange rates at the time) on East Germany in the three years following unification. This naturally meant a big increase in the state debt of the Federal Republic, and an increase in borrowing costs – not just for Germany.
Much like Poland, the transition in East Germany amounted to a sharp economic shock. This was guaranteed by the terms of the currency union and the scale and speed of privatization. The former East German economy was exposed after unification to the most rapid and radical liberalization of any former Soviet-bloc country. But at least the East Germans, unlike the citizens of any other former Soviet-bloc country, could rely upon huge subsidies from their far wealthier neighbour. From 1991, indeed, a ‘solidarity subsidy’, partly to help finance the transition in East Germany, was deducted from German pay packets. (It also comprised Germany’s contribution to the costs of the first Gulf War, and was such a useful addition to the revenue of the Federal government – eventually totalling around 15 billion Euros a year – that it was retained indefinitely, to the increasing irritation of most of the population.)
The economic and social complexities of unification were recognized as truly daunting even before it took place. The psychological problems of adjustment would prove over time perhaps even more challenging. But there could be no turning back. Nor did the will exist to do so either within Germany, or internationally – despite the misgivings in Paris and London. By the end of September the last political difficulties had been surmounted. A treaty between the two German states to resolve legal and administrative technicalities involved in unification was signed on 31 August 1990, ratified by both the People’s Chamber of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Parliament on 20 September, and came into force on 29 September. On 24 September the German Democratic Republic, in agreement with the Soviet Union, left the Warsaw Pact. A week later the four occupying powers brought their old rights and responsibilities to an end (though ratification – the nearest thing to a treaty to end the Second World War, if over forty years late – only took place in stages over the following months). On the stroke of midnight on 3 October 1990, amid a huge celebratory street party in Berlin, the Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker pronounced the unity of Germany and the country’s wish to work for global peace in a united Europe. For Helmut Kohl, the ‘unity Chancellor’, it was an extraordinary triumph.
It was unquestionably a moment of unique historical significance, not just for Germany, but for the whole of Europe and, in its implications, for international relations more generally. It marked the symbolic end of an era in which the German nation state had first inflicted unimaginable suffering and destruction on Europe, then, divided for forty years, in its western part at least, had contributed greatly to building the foundations of a new Europe resting on peace, prosperity and stability. What the future would bring might be uncertain. For now, however, there was widespread rejoicing in Germany – if still some foreboding among Germany’s neighbours.
While the drama in its former satellite states in Central Europe and in the Balkans had been unfolding, the Soviet Union itself was imploding. The process that had essentially begun in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev had embarked upon his structural reform programme – intended to keep the Communist Party in power, not to break its power – had for four years, like a brewing great ocean storm, gathered force. From spring 1989 onwards, for the following two years and more, the storm raged, reaching hurricane strength in the summer of 1991, when it finally blew the Soviet Union away.
During this period Gorbachev’s international stardom contrasted with the ebbing away of his power within the Soviet Union itself. Until the summer of 1991 he was still, without question, the towering figure in Soviet politics. But he was increasingly buffeted by the gale-force winds of change that he had unleashed. He no longer controlled events. Instead, he was their captive. Within the Soviet Union itself, as had been the case in the former satellite states, the power of the people was making itself felt, most obviously in the mounting displays of serious unrest and increasingly shrill nationalist demands for independence in the non-Russian republics, especially in the Baltic and the Caucasus. But also in Russia itself from 1990 onwards Gorbachev’s once unassailable popularity was collapsing. He was more and more seen as the cause of all the woes besetting the once-mighty Soviet Union – the loss of the former satellite states, the deterioration in living standards at home, the separatist pressures of the outlying republics, the unmistakable decline of what had until recently been a superpower. Politically, he was attacked both by hardline reactionaries, who saw him as a traitor responsible for the destruction of all that had been great about the Soviet Union, and by radical reformers, who wanted to go further and faster than Gorbachev himself.
Prominent among the latter was the person who emerged as his most dangerous opponent and who would eventually supplant him: the impulsive, domineering, flamboyant, unpredictably wilful but shrewdly effective political operator Boris Yeltsin. In the 1980s Yeltsin had been the First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, but frustrated by the slow pace of reform he had – an unprecedented step – resigned in 1987 from the Politburo, had strongly criticized Gorbachev, and had a few weeks later been sacked as party boss in Moscow. He never forgave Gorbachev for the demotion. His election as a non-party delegate, with massive popular support, to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union in March 1989 then gave him a new platform from which to launch forthright attacks on Gorbachev. Yeltsin’s heavy drinking provided opportunities for the controlled press to smear him. But the attacks did not dent his popularity. For Russians, he, not Gorbachev, seemed to offer hope for the future. And increasingly this meant for ordinary people the chance to improve their lives through access to the goods and commodities that Westerners took for granted. A sign of things to come was the opening of the first McDonalds fast-food outlet in Moscow on 31 January 1990, when the queue of thousands of Muscovites preparing to spend precious roubles on their first taste of a ‘Big Mac’ snaked around the block. For most non-Russians, meanwhile, the future lay in independence from Moscow. They increasingly looked to nationalist movements that sought total autonomy from the Russian-dominated Soviet Union.
Centrifugal forces were now threatening to tear apart the highly centralized states system of the Soviet Union. The perimeter was endangering the centre. The system was being eroded from the outside in. There was trouble in early April 1989 when the police and soldiers turned on a rally of around 100,000 backers of independence in Tblisi, the Georgian capital, leaving nineteen civilian protesters dead. Troops were sent to Estonia, Latvia and Uzbekistan to head off the possibility of similar demonstrations. But the pressure for greater autonomy could no longer be held back by sheer coercion.
The anti-Soviet mood, growing fast, was particularly pronounced in the Baltic. Older inhabitants could still remember the years of independence before Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. There was resentment at the influx of ethnic Russians. And access to Scandinavian television gave people a sense of the Western prosperity they were missing. In the Baltic republics the elections of March 1989 had seen strong support for candidates who favoured independence, and now won seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies. On 11 March, Lithuania went so far as to declare its independence. The old national flag was reintroduced and the Soviet Hammer and Sickle flag disappeared overnight. Moscow rejected the Lithuanian declaration as invalid. A fortnight later Soviet tanks were sent in and rumbled past the Lithuanian parliament building in Vilnius, though, following this threatening demonstration of force, they withdrew after a few hours without opening fire. There was to be no repeat of Hungary in 1956. But Lithuania was subjected to economic blockade, and had its oil supplies cut off for a time. And this was not the last attempt by the Soviet government to prevent Lithuania’s secession.
Elsewhere, too, the Soviet Union faced worrying problems. It had from the 1920s been a federation, dominated by Russia, of nominally autonomous republics, built around the main ethnic population of a region. Ethnic tensions were now an indication of the fraying fabric of the federation. Serious ethnic unrest flared in Uzbekistan in June, when hordes of Uzbek youths set on the Turkish-speaking Meshketian minority. According to official figures ninety-five were killed, hundreds more injured, a good deal of property destroyed, and thousands were forced to flee from Uzbekistan. Across the summer there were further outbreaks of violence in the Central Asian republics and demonstrations in favour of national independence in Georgia. The weakening of Soviet rule was also shown by huge strikes about living conditions by miners in western Siberia and Ukraine (estimated to number 300,000 men) in July, which led in October to the Supreme Soviet conceding the right to strike – an upturning of the principle that the Communist Party and its official trade unions could alone determine the interests of workers. In August an extraordinary million-strong human chain stretched through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in protest at the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which had preceded their annexation by the Soviet Union the following year. By September 1989 the signs of disintegration were coming closer to the heart of the Soviet Union when a movement seeking Ukrainian autonomy, the Ukrainian Popular Front, held its inaugural congress in Kiev.
The deployment of the Soviet army could not prevent tensions and violence continuing in the Caucasus and Central Asian republics in 1990. There were serious ethnic clashes, in which around fifty people died, between Azerbaijanis and Armenians in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in January 1990 over the disputed region of Nagorny Karabakh. When Soviet troops were sent in to quell the disturbances they met fierce resistance from activists of the Ajerbaijani Popular Front. By the time they had restored order about 130 civilians had been killed and several hundreds more left injured.
In the Baltic, too, there was no lessening of the momentum towards autonomy, amid signs of growing animosity towards the ethnic Russian minority population. In May 1990 the nationalist-dominated parliaments in Estonia and Latvia had followed Lithuania’s example over a year earlier in voting for independence. During the summer moves to autonomy took place in many parts of the Soviet Union. Even the most important, Ukraine and Russia itself, declared their sovereignty, though for the time being they saw this as compatible with continued membership of the Soviet Union. There was, however, little doubt that the Soviet Union, if still in existence, was by now on a life-support machine.
The struggle for independence in the Baltic republics posed a particularly acute problem. The Soviet Union was, however, not yet ready to concede defeat. Soviet troops based in Vilnius and Riga, the capitals of Lithuania and Latvia respectively, attempted in January 1991 to overthrow the elected governments and crush the moves to independence. But the show of Soviet force was met by huge popular protest in both countries. There was bloodshed. Fourteen Lithuanian and four Latvian civilians were killed and hundreds injured in the ensuing disturbances. In Moscow itself there were big protests at the violence. Yeltsin publicly supported the moves towards autonomy. The violence could not stop what had become inevitable. Over 90 per cent of Lithuanians supported independence in a referendum in early February. Similar plebiscites in Latvia and Estonia in early March saw three-quarters of voters supporting independence. Perhaps in an earlier era Soviet armed might would have crushed even such overwhelming displays of popular feeling. But by 1991 the Soviet Union was no longer prepared to defy the will of almost the entire population and to try to hold down the Baltic countries simply by force.
The erosion of the system was meanwhile spreading to the centre of Soviet politics. As the state, run by its monopoly party, lost its grip, factions increasingly jockeyed for position. The gulf between the reformers and the reactionaries was wider than ever. Gorbachev was far from radical enough for those who wanted to go much farther and faster that he did himself in dismantling the Soviet Union. The reformers were not united in their aims, which were in any case still inchoate. Some wanted the introduction of capitalist markets. Others were nationalists who wanted greater power and independence for the republics. Yeltsin himself straddled both groups, though as yet he did not clearly reveal where he stood. Gorbachev’s conservative opponents at the opposite extreme increasingly detested him and the disastrous trajectory of damaging change (in their eyes) that he had inflicted on the Soviet Union, though they were not strong enough to topple him. He had even so to tread carefully. He remained tactically nimble. But he could satisfy neither wing of his serious critics. His desire to sustain the integrity of the Soviet Union while accepting, even welcoming, political and economic changes that in practice undermined it, was a basic weakness. Did he actually still want reformed communism – his initial aim? Or did he want Western-style social democracy and capitalist economics? Unquestionably he had moved towards the latter. But apart from what was tactically advisable to say in public, his private stance was not categorically clear. He remained within the Communist Party, still its General Secretary, even when reformers were urging him to leave it and when the political choices he made were more obviously those of a social democrat. He still did not confront the contradictions of attempting fundamental reform within the political straitjacket of the Soviet system. His position was increasingly at risk. He was endangered from both sides.
He was still powerful enough in the spring of 1990, however, to surmount any challenge from within, and could count upon the backing of the large reform factions in the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People’s Deputies. By April 1990 the Congress had ratified the dramatic constitutional change that Gorbachev had successfully engineered in the Supreme Soviet in February, abolishing the political monopoly of the Communist Party and recognizing multi-party politics. On the surface his position even appeared strengthened after he had been elected in mid-March for the newly created post of President of the Soviet Union. As Chairman of the Supreme Soviet he had already been de facto head of state, but the new office gave him extended executive rights since the Congress had decided to disempower the Politburo. In reality, however, his position was becoming significantly weaker, especially once Boris Yeltsin had in May 1990 been elected Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet – the head of easily the largest and most important of the Soviet republics, comprising three-quarters of the entire Soviet territory. He gave Russian interests clear priority over those of the Soviet Union. A drastic reduction in the Russian contribution to Soviet tax revenue significantly weakened Gorbachev’s position. Yeltsin gained popular support from Russian nationalists, and elite backing from economists attracted by neo-liberal thinking on the free market (and hopes of large-scale American aid). The Russian nationalists saw the other republics (with the exception of Belarus and Ukraine) as peripheral, non-Slavic entities, whose independence would enhance and strengthen Russia itself. As Gorbachev’s popularity plummeted in the wake of the calamitous economic conditions, for which he was personally held responsible, Yeltsin’s star as the Russian people’s champion was plainly in the ascendancy.
The next months saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union played out against the backdrop of looming complete economic collapse. Compared even with 1990 – itself a year of misery – production fell drastically in 1991 and the budget deficit rose equally alarmingly. There were shortages of consumer goods and fuel. Food prices doubled. Unsurprisingly, popular support drained away from an increasingly hapless Gorbachev, whose plan for economic recovery had proved a sorry failure. Well over half of Soviet citizens, according to an opinion survey in autumn 1990, said their lives had become worse under Gorbachev; only 8 per cent thought they had improved.
Gorbachev’s bitter conservative enemies were meanwhile marshalling their energies in an organization calling itself Soyuz (Union), founded in October 1990. And the most evident threat to Gorbachev was still the ominous rise of Yeltsin, who had left the Communist Party that summer and the following June won a personal mandate in the Russian presidential elections. While Gorbachev looked more and more like a defeated man presiding over a fractured Soviet Union, Yeltsin was building an unassailable base of support in Russia. Nearly quarter of a million citizens of Moscow defied the strong presence of security police to demonstrate in favour of Yeltsin in March 1991. Amid the tottering foundations of a once mighty edifice, they warmed to a rhetoric that exuded confidence in Russia’s future and they liked the image of strength that he conveyed.
Yeltsin was still not in a position to challenge Gorbachev for supremacy. In the spring of 1991 he in fact saw tactical advantage in working alongside Gorbachev, despite their differences, in advocating a new Union treaty, to be signed on 20 August, ostensibly to increase the powers of the Soviet republics, creating a ‘Union of Sovereign States’ in which little more than economic policy and military affairs would remain Soviet prerogatives. In reality, Yeltsin was only genuinely interested in bolstering the power of Russia itself – and, with that, fortifying his own position.
Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s conservative enemies were stirring. On 23 July 1991 twelve prominent Soviet figures – mainly party functionaries, if not of the highest ranks, the leader of Soyuz, and also two army generals – signed ‘A Word to the People’, published in the press, which passionately denounced the ‘enormous, unprecedented misfortune’ to have befallen ‘the Motherland, our country, the great state entrusted to us by history, by nature and by our glorious forebears’, which was ‘perishing, being broken up and plunged into darkness and oblivion’. Other opponents of Gorbachev almost certainly knew of the composition of the letter and stood behind its sentiments, even if they remained in the shadows. The Americans had warned Gorbachev in June of a conspiracy brewing against him. But he had heard it all before from leading reformers at home. Undaunted, but gravely underestimating the danger, he put Yeltsin temporarily in charge in Moscow and left in early August for a much-needed holiday in the Crimea.
The plotters launched their coup on 18 August. At his holiday dacha Gorbachev discovered that his telephone connections had been cut off. Three of the conspirators turned up to advise him to hand over power temporarily to his Vice-President, Gennadi Yanaev. Gorbachev refused outright. Back in Moscow the leaders of the putsch – Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov (head of the KGB, the Soviet State Security service), Boris Pugo (Minister of Internal Affairs), Valentin Pavlov (the Prime Minister), Marshal Dimitri Yazov (Defence Minister), and Vice-President Yanaev – formed a State Committee that would run the country following the state of emergency they planned to announce on 19 August.
In fact, they bungled practically every move, failing even to block the telephone network, prevent satellite television from operating, or arrest Yeltsin and others still loyal to Gorbachev. They further miscalculated in putting in charge of military operations in Moscow Pavel Grachev, Commander of Soviet Airborne Ground-Forces, who transpired not to be a supporter of the coup at all. With Grachev’s tacit backing, Yeltsin was able during the morning of 19 August to rally support. It took courage and boldness. In the most memorable moment of the drama that was swiftly beamed around the world on television, he climbed onto a tank outside the Russian Supreme Soviet headquarters (known as the White House) to denounce the coup. The next day and a half were tense. The State Committee had not given up, and ordered tanks to move in on the White House. But once more the power of the people played an important part. Crowds of citizens, many of them young Muscovites, defied the display of force in anti-coup demonstrations that gathered strength on 20 August. Three protesters were killed. By that evening, however, the coup was crumbling. The plotters were divided on their course of action and military commanders were refusing their orders. By early afternoon on 21 August the coup was over. The plotters were arrested. Two of them committed suicide. Next morning Gorbachev arrived back from the Crimea. He had remained resolute throughout the crisis. But he had understandably been seriously weakened by the coup. The following days would plainly show how rapidly his power was draining away. The hero of the hour had been Boris Yeltsin.
The end for the Soviet Union was quickly approaching. Any prospect of renewal through the new treaty envisaged by Gorbachev was by now dead. On 23 August 1991 Yeltsin suspended the Soviet Communist Party within Russia (and would later, on 6 November, go on to ban it altogether). And he announced a new cabinet, with himself as Prime Minister, which would instigate a programme of sweeping economic reforms built upon principles of a liberal market economy.
The other republics were meanwhile also going their own way. Nearly all of them had opposed the putsch. Once it failed they exploited the evident weakness of the floundering Soviet Union to press home their own claims to independence. The Baltic states led the procession. Yeltsin recognized their independence in the name of Russia on 24 August. Over the following three days Ukraine, Belorussia (now calling itself Belarus), Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan all proclaimed their independence from the Soviet Union. A number of other republics followed suit in September. The Soviet Union was left comprising only Russia and Kazakhstan. The final nail in its coffin was when 90 per cent of Ukrainians backed the declaration of independence in a referendum on 1 December. A week later, on 8 December, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union and to form a Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose formation in which any semblance of unity was restricted to economic and military matters. Eight further republics joined them on 21 December. The three Baltic states and Georgia, which like Lithuania had declared its independence as early as March 1990, refused the invitation to membership in order to go their own way.
Gorbachev had already on 24 August resigned as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the key post that since Stalin had been the fount of power in the Soviet Union. He remained for the time being President, though this was by now a largely empty title for an office devoid of real power or purpose. In a television address on 25 December, Gorbachev stepped down from this office too. That evening he formally transferred all his powers to Yeltsin, the Russian President, who entered the Kremlin in the early morning two days later and celebrated with his closest supporters over a bottle of whisky.
In his final television address to the country, Gorbachev defended his record. His reforms, he declared, were historically necessary and justified. They had, he stated, dismantled totalitarianism, which had inflicted poverty on the country, and had brought the breakthrough to democratic transformation and liberal freedoms. And through the ending of the Cold War the threat of another world war had been eliminated. The message was more likely to receive a warm welcome in the West than among the citizens of the dying Soviet Union. Among the latter Gorbachev sharply divided opinion. He had paved the way for their new-found independence, for democratic pluralism, and for freedoms impossible to contemplate as long as the Communist Party held monopoly power. But for many among his critics, however fine democratic principles and aspirations were, Gorbachev had worsened their living standards. And he had ended the Cold War only by capitulating to the West and reducing what had once been a mighty superpower to humiliating inferiority. ‘We had an empire when he took over the Kremlin,’ recalled a Moscow taxi-driver bitterly years later. ‘By the time he left six years later, it was all gone. He sold us off to the West. He just caved in.’ Gorbachev himself continued to feel enormous regret for the demise of the Soviet Union. ‘I regret that a great country with huge possibilities and resources vanished,’ he told an interviewer long after the events. ‘My intention was always to reform it, never to destroy it.’
On 31 December 1991, sixty-nine years after its foundation, seventy-four years after the Russian Revolution that had led to its creation, the Soviet Union was dissolved. There were no fanfares; there was no dramatic ending. At the last, it just fizzled out. Even so, it was an epochal date – the end of a momentous episode in history, the point of failure of probably the most remarkable political experiment in modern times. The Soviet Union had been central to the era of catastrophic conflict that culminated in the terrible bloodshed of the Second World War. Since emerging victorious, if at enormous cost in human lives and untold devastation from the titanic showdown with Hitler’s Germany, it had attained domination over the eastern half of Europe, developed into a superpower, and indelibly shaped not just European but global affairs. The edifice built on violent struggle by Lenin and his followers during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent horrific civil war in Russia had promised a coming utopia built on equality and justice.
It proved, however, a construction that could only work – and even then at unimaginable human cost – within a vast, undeveloped country which was converted through extraordinary levels of coercion into a mighty force that could withstand four horrific years of war against Nazi Germany, then turn into a superpower in possession of a huge nuclear arsenal. The model was not transferrable to other parts of Europe that had far different social, economic, political and cultural structures. Nowhere, either in the Soviet Union itself or in any of its post-war satellite countries in Central and Eastern Europe, did the majority of people choose communism in free elections. Although Soviet rule was backed by many (if over time a declining number) idealistic true believers in communism, and many more opportunistic fellow travellers, it proved capable of sustaining its ever more plainly empty promises only through the tight clamp of extreme coercion and suppression of freedom. Gorbachev had loosened that clamp to the point where the peoples of the Soviet Union could force it apart completely. And without the clamp there was nothing left.
Some on the left mourned the end of the Soviet Union. They regretted the failure of what at one time had seemed an optimistic face of the future, an alternative to the damaging inequities of capitalism. The sense of loss was not confined to the former apparatchiks and beneficiaries of the system, nor those who lamented the loss of empire and decline of a great power. The great historian Eric Hobsbawm, a convinced Marxist since his youth, was far from alone among left-wing intellectuals in recognizing the systemic failings of the Soviet system, acknowledging that he would not have wanted to live under it, but still lamenting its demise. Hobsbawm admired Gorbachev (though he wished there had been a ‘less ambitious and more realistic reformer’), but was gloomy about the post-Soviet future. When the Soviet Union foundered, he wrote, ‘the losers, in the short and medium term, were not only the peoples of the former USSR, but the poor of the world’.
Regrets did not extend in the West, however, far beyond the shrivelled minority – even among Western communists – of those who had clung to their belief in the superiority of the Soviet system to the end. Liberals and social democrats shed no tears, while those on the conservative right, in Western Europe and even more so in the United States, congratulated themselves on winning the Cold War. They applauded President Reagan’s hardline stance (abetted by his British acolyte, the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher) on communism, revelling in what they saw as the vindication of the ‘Star Wars’ programme and levels of military spending that had demonstrated Western economic superiority and exposed Soviet weakness. They did not conceal their sense of triumph at what they paraded as the victory of liberal capitalism over state socialism, of freedom over serfdom.
Most people, though, refrained from outright triumphalism. Relief was more apparent – relief that the Cold War was finally over and, consequently, that the danger of nuclear conflict had been eliminated. This mingled with satisfaction at the collapse of a system built upon oppression and unfreedom and the sense that Western values had triumphed. In Central and Eastern Europe the relief, though echoing similar sentiments, had a different tone. People there above all felt relief that the long years of subjugation to the heavy hand of communist rule, backed by the interests of the Soviet Union, were finally over. They could start to reclaim their own national identities. And they could hope in due course to benefit from the prosperity that Western Europe enjoyed.
There was, even so, little prolonged rejoicing. The former Soviet satellites were already exposed to the difficult problems of adjusting to the brave new world they had entered. Fleeting euphoria was swiftly tempered by new hardships. And for the people of Western Europe the collapse of the Soviet Union had been too protracted, the actual end too undramatic, for any explosion of joy at the death of the old ideological enemy. Other issues were already occupying attention, not least war in the Persian Gulf in 1990–1 in the wake of the crisis precipitated by Iraq’s invasion of the neighbouring Arab country of Kuwait. In the West the real moment of euphoria about the downfall of communism had been earlier, in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell – the symbolic moment when the Soviet clamp on Eastern Europe was broken. What followed had amounted to a long coda.
There was, even so, widespread recognition that the death of the Soviet Union marked a historic caesura, a major turning point in history. Writing in The Guardian on 27 December 1991, Martin Woollacott echoed a commonplace sentiment: ‘The twentieth century came to an end at 7pm Moscow time on December 25, 1991’ – when Gorbachev had broadcast his resignation as leader of the Soviet Union. ‘It is as if the business of our century is over ahead of the calendar. The two enormous conflicts which have characterised it, that between capitalism and communism, and that between the old empires and the new powers – struggles that have interacted through the decades – have ended. “Bolshevism”, as Winston Churchill in 1918 demanded it should, has finally “committed suicide”.’
Three years later, in his celebrated Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm also portrayed the demise of the Soviet Union as the end of the ‘short twentieth century’, an era that had come to a close, one defined by the contest between capitalism and communism. From a conservative perspective, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to claim that it marked ‘the end of History’. In his book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, he drew upon a widely read and controversial essay he had published three years earlier, as the sweeping changes in Eastern Europe were taking hold. Fukuyama was not making the patently absurd claim, as some critics naively presumed, that events would not continue, that history in this sense would cease. Rather, he was arguing in philosophical terms, drawing in part on ideas adumbrated by the famous early nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had seen the victory of the principles of liberty and equality, spread after the French Revolution, as the final stage of history. Fukuyama argued that with the triumph of liberal democracy over its only serious challenger, communism, ideological development had reached the peak of its evolution, and with that ‘History’ (with a capital ‘H’) had therefore come to an end. After the demise of communism, wrote Fukuyama, ‘liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe’. As ‘the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty’ liberal democracy was left as the sole ‘competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity’. In the huge debate that ensued, this bold thesis unsurprisingly attracted heavy criticism. It was not just viewed as erroneous. It was also widely regarded as the reflection of triumphalist American neo-conservatism.
The subsequent course of world history has indeed done little to uphold Fukuyama’s argument. The cultural and political rejection of the principles of liberal democracy in large parts of the world casts doubt on the teleological presumption of the ‘end of History’. The Chinese model of economic liberalism and political authoritarianism, which successfully produced extraordinary growth in China, has posed a serious challenge to those, not just in the West, who long presumed that a market economy would inevitably lead to liberal democracy. The future is as unpredictable as it was when Hegel first determined that ‘History’ had reached its end. The upheavals in Europe between 1989 and 1991 that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the alternative to capitalist liberal democracy that it had represented for nearly three-quarters of a century, did not amount, even in Fukuyama’s philosophical terms, to the end of ‘History’. They were nevertheless a political earthquake with seismic consequences for the entire world, and quite specifically for Europe. After 1991 Europe was a new place.
The new Europe was no longer split down the middle by the Iron Curtain. But the end of the decades-old bifurcation of the continent did not signify the approach of unity. Rather, Europe was now divided into four distinguishable groupings. A fundamental ideological split, it is true, no longer existed, but the differences between the groupings were scarcely insignificant.
The first grouping comprised the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and eight other former Soviet Republics – formed in the last days of the Soviet collapse. These countries had no traditional basis in pluralist democracy, legal autonomy, or the institutions (including Churches, trade unions, an independent press) that in much of the rest of Europe had over time given rise to extensive realms of civilian freedom from state control. In the turmoil that followed the breakdown of a regime that had dominated this part of Europe for some seventy years, it was unsurprising that these former Soviet republics would look to strong figures as presidents, such as Yeltsin in Russia, Leonid Kravchuk in Ukraine or Aleksandr Lukashenko, the dictatorial President of Belarus from 1994 onwards, ostensibly to uphold order. History, as well as geography, separated this part of Europe from most of the remainder of the continent. It would continue to follow a separate path.
At the other end of the spectrum were the countries of Western Europe. For them the end of the Soviet Union, following German unification, meant that the potential for European unity beyond the traditional boundaries of Western Europe and the existing confines of the European Community had suddenly opened up. The question of European integration had to be rethought. This was necessary not just to make sure that Germany was inextricably bound to the West, but also to take account of the aspirations of the countries freed from Soviet control (though at no point was it seriously imagined that integration would extend to Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union). How could the new, but poor, democracies of Central and Eastern Europe be incorporated within the project of European integration? And what were the geopolitical implications of the new Europe? How far, for instance, should the Western defence alliance, NATO, stretch into Eastern Europe? Or was NATO now even redundant since there was no longer an Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact (disbanded in 1991) had ceased to exist?
The third loose grouping were the countries that had formerly been bracketed together in Western eyes as ‘Eastern Europe’, themselves far from a unified bloc. Some of them – notably Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary – could look back to a pre-communist past in which there had been a pronounced sense of national identity and it had involved some experience, however chequered, of pluralist democracy. They had also, even under communist rule, created or nurtured important elements of a culture that existed beyond the tentacles of the state. Moreover, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, less so Poland, had never seen themselves as part of ‘Eastern Europe’. They had always regarded themselves as the core of Central Europe, a geographically vague entity but one that had enjoyed strong cultural links to Austria and Germany – links that extended for the most part westwards rather than in the direction of Moscow. They now saw the opportunity to rebuild their national identities, democratic traditions and cultural vitality. They also, not least, felt the strong gravitational pull of Western European prosperity. Economically and culturally, the countries of Central Europe sought to rejoin a Europe from which they had been cut off for so long.
The Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – though geographically part of Eastern Europe, also shared with the Central European countries long-standing traditions of national independence, even if their fragile interwar democracies had been of short duration. They harboured bitter resentment at the Soviet annexation in 1940, had vehemently fought to re-establish their independence among the dying embers of the Soviet Union, and now looked to the West – to NATO and to the European Community – for protection against any future Russian encroachment, and to the prosperity that they saw bound up with Western democracy. Naturally, the Russians looked askance at any such extension of NATO’s scope.
In south-eastern Europe the post-Soviet world left yet another constellation. The collapse of communist rule in Bulgaria and Romania had been replaced by what amounted to little more than facade democracies. There had been too much corruption, poverty ran too deep, and there had been little development of the intermediary structures of civil society to allow a smooth transition to a well-functioning liberal democracy. When the dust began to settle after the enormous upheaval, power still lay disproportionately in the hands of those who had been part of the old regimes. These countries, too, envied the prosperity of the European Community. But joining the Community was at best a distant aspiration. This was even more true of Albania, where the communist regime staggered on until it finally fell in March 1992, but where, in this poorest of all the former European communist states, corruption, criminality and the legacy of decades of authoritarian rule meant that the transition to anything genuinely resembling democracy, and one that could harbour hopes of integration into the European Community, would be a lengthy process.
Yugoslavia had never belonged to the Soviet bloc. There, the tensions that had mounted since Tito’s death in May 1980 amid serious and growing economic problems had exacerbated emerging ethnic conflict. And, as Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in 1989, these played out with terrible consequences.
Finally, the end of the Soviet Union, and of the Cold War, not only reshaped Europe. It also changed global politics. Mikhail Gorbachev had ensured that in its last years the Soviet Union had acted in collaboration with the United States to defuse a number of long-standing bitter conflicts on the African continent – in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola and Namibia. He also helped to impress upon the African National Congress in South Africa a new readiness to come to terms with the presiding apartheid regime it had fought for so long. The last head of state of apartheid South Africa, President F. W. de Clerk, also became ready to negotiate with the African National Congress once it was deprived of Soviet backing and the threat of communist revolution in southern Africa had consequently receded. The release from prison, where he had been incarcerated for twenty-seven years, on 11 February 1990 of Nelson Mandela, internationally lauded as the face of opposition to the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, was symbolically the moment of new hope for the future. But with the demise of the Soviet Union a number of African states – and, in Latin America, Cuba – lost a protector (of sorts) and a source of financial support. The way ahead for them was not one of rapidly increasing prosperity but of further exposure to the rapacious demands of the swiftly expanding globalized economy.
Not least, the collapse of one of the two superpowers of the post-war world had opened up the prospect, and for a time the reality, of American global dominance, of unipolar power in world affairs. Over time China would come to challenge that dominance, as would a resurgent Russia. Meanwhile, however, American neo-conservatives rejoiced at the prospect of hegemony: the United States had won the Cold War, the future under a pax americana looked bright. The first years of the new post-Soviet era would soon put that proposition to the test, and in Europe itself. For war was about to return to the European continent.