On a bleak afternoon on the next to the last night of the year, I felt an abrupt and overwhelming need to be out of Romania, out of Eastern Europe, before the New Year rolled in. Perhaps it was a visit to Bucharest’s main cemetery. A light snow covered mounds of earth from hundreds of fresh graves, open and gaping in long straight rows. “Here are the fallen,” a solemn priest intoned across the field of dead as four men placed a wooden coffin before him on a wobbly trestle. Jacob Stetincu, shot by a sniper while crossing the street, lay wrapped in a thin white cotton sheet, wearing a worn blue beret, snowflakes catching in his mustache. After a hurried sacrament the men nailed shut the lid, carried him to the nearest grave, his widow struggling to keep up, and shoveled in the heavy earth. A few feet away, others hacked at the frozen ground. The priest, working in shifts with a dozen of his brethren, was already shaking holy water on the next victim of Ceausescu’s reign.
“Revolution overload,” one friend called it. Too much, too fast, too intimately. The faded Orient Express left late that night. When it stopped the next afternoon in the switching yards of Budapest’s main station, for a three-hour layover, I climbed out a window, schlepped my gear a mile down the tracks and hailed a taxi for Vienna, several hours away. A flight to Frankfurt. Another two-hour taxi to Bonn. A few minutes after midnight, twenty-seven hours after leaving Bucharest, I walked into my house with a party of friends and neighbors singing “Auld Lang Syne,” just as they were in Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Budapest.
For the people living in these newly free cities, it was a time of joy. In Berlin, so-called Mauer-peckers whittled the Wall away with hammers and chisels. On Christmas Day, Leonard Bernstein conducted the philharmonic at the newly opened Brandenburg Gate, playing Beethoven’s Ninth (“Ode to Joy”) with the word joy changed to freedom. Less than a year later, on October 3, 1990, Germany reunited.
The Wall began a long slow fade into historical imagination. Much of it was quickly knocked down. A 260-foot stretch stands today, as a tourist destination, near the old Gestapo headquarters in central Berlin, midway between Potsdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie. Another stretch runs along the river Spree near the Oberbaumbrücke, dubbed the East Side Gallery for its graffiti-covered face (all painted post-Fall). Still more chunks have been exported around the world—mainly to the capitals of the perceived victors in the Cold War: London, New York, Washington. They stand here and there, vaguely incongruous, providing shade for lunching bankers or secretaries, oblivious to their once ominous portent.
Mikhail Gorbachev deserves enormous credit. He was the geopolitical demiurge, the prime mover that set all else in motion. Without him, the history of Eastern Europe and the end of communism would have been vastly different. His reward for services to humanity was to be unceremoniously ousted, after an attempted coup, when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
Egon Krenz tried to claim credit. In an interview the summer after the Wall came down, he told me that he had “instructed border officials to open the frontiers,” sometime around 9:15 p.m. But that simply doesn’t jibe with the facts. He was thrown out as the GDR’s last communist head of state on December 7, 1989, by a party desperate to change its image. In 1997, he was sentenced to six and a half years in jail for crimes against humanity, specifically manslaughter of Germans attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall.
Erich Honecker fled to Moscow after the collapse of the GDR, to be extradited in 1992, tried for treason and jailed in the Federal Republic. He died in exile in Chile on May 29, 1994, of cancer, unrepentant.
Gunter Schabowski would be one of the few top leaders to repudiate communism. I met him in early 1999, just after his seventieth birthday. He was helping a local newspaper in little Rotenberg am Fulda with their graphic design. Photoshop! Quark! “Are you a computer freak?” he asked disarmingly when I arrived to spend half a day with him. He chatted about his Macintosh and lamented its lack of processing power. Only 160 RAM! And it took so long to download digital photos. Even then the resolution was poor, he said, muttering about pixel counts. At the close of our interview, he took a picture of the two of us and processed it through his computer. “Just so you’ll remember meeting this old toad,” he said.
In Warsaw, Lech Walesa went on to become Poland’s president, replacing General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1990. Jaruzelski subsequently faced charges for murder during the period of martial law and was defended by former leaders of Solidarity. In 2005, he apologized for his role in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, calling it a great “political and moral mistake.”
On Sunday, December 10, 1989, International Human Rights Day, President Gustav Husak swore in Czechoslovakia’s first noncommunist government since World War II. Then he himself resigned. Who would replace him? Jan Urban, tired but jubilant, wore the answer on his lapel, a little campaign button reading HAVEL FOR PRESIDENT. He was sworn in on December 29, 1989. The celebrations on Wenceslas Square went on all night.
We had one last conversation. Outwardly, Havel looked the same as ever, down to his faded green army jacket. But he seemed distracted, even evasive. The revolution was over and we both had the odd feeling that, for the moment at least, everything had been said. We spoke a bit about the whimsy of fortune, from jail to the presidency in six months. “Yes, a lot has happened,” Havel said. “I learned in prison that everything is possible, so I should not be amazed. But I am amazed.”
Then he told a story I’ve often heard repeated: “For a long time, I thought that all this might just have been a colorful dream, and that I would wake up in my cell and tell my fellow inmates about this dream. ‘Oh, Havel,’ they would tell me, ‘you are becoming bigheaded about being an important dissident.’ So from time to time during these days—we must still decide what to call these events—I would ask my friends if we were dreaming. They would say, ‘No,’ but it was not until yesterday that I really felt that it was so. I took a stroll through Pruhonice Park, outside Prague. It was the first time in a month that I could spend some time in the open air and feel the heavens above me, and for the first time I felt that from now on I could live in a different way, less dependent on messages of encouragement from, say, the Dalai Lama!”
Havel, like his country, was beginning a new life, not merely as president but as a person. But instead of asking more about this, continuing the conversation as a conversation, I lapsed into journalist mode. How did he feel about a writer as president? “Well, I could at least write my own speeches.” He laughed, but he was torn. He wanted to return to being a playwright, and he wanted to be president. If asked, he said, “I would accept this post on the condition that I hold it only until another president is elected to a full five-year term.” After that, he would prefer to complete the play he was writing when events interrupted. What would it be called? He didn’t know, just yet. But his last one was aptly titled, didn’t I think? Slum Clearance. It was about to open in New York, he added, and close in Prague.
As if in keeping with the quiet way in which it began, the year ended in Budapest with only the faintest echo of the celebrations elsewhere. A new national parliament adopted Kalman Kulcsar’s cherished Constitution, modeled on that of the United States and enshrining free speech and private property (not to mention the pursuit of happiness) as inalienable rights of man.
Imre Pozsgay abolished the communist party and expected to lead a revived Socialist Party to the presidency. But voters would not elect a former communist to high office, however heroic a patriot he might have been, and he returned to teaching at the University of Debrecen, just as when he was on the outs with the ruling regime of yore.
In contrast to Poland, whose communists enjoyed a protected place in parliament, Hungary had scheduled completely free elections for March 1990. That fully democratic free-for-all would unseat all those most responsible for Hungary’s freedom. Unlike Pozsgay, Miklos Nemeth anticipated that his term as prime minister would end with that historic ballot. “I saw it coming long before,” he told me. “I belonged to the party. A member of the former regime could never last, no matter how good his works.” His reward for changing the world would, when I first saw him again ten years later, be a job as a mid- to upper-level vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, in charge of human resources.
Yet Nemeth had one last victory in those final days, a secret one that few ever knew about. Toward year’s end, he received a letter hand-delivered from the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, accompanied by armed guards. The ambassador did not know what the letter contained, nor was he allowed to stay while Nemeth read it.
Privately he opened it. The Soviet Union is pleased to inform you, it read, that all nuclear weapons have been removed from Hungarian soil—weapons that Moscow had always denied deploying in Hungary or other Warsaw Pact nations.
This was the grim secret that Nemeth had become privy to in December 1988, after being named prime minister. He had raised the matter with Gorbachev in March, insisting that the weapons be withdrawn despite his only being in office four months. “I’ll get back to you,” the Russian leader had said. To this day, Nemeth does not know how the Soviets got them out without anyone in his government knowing, just as he does not know how they got them into Hungary in the first place. He went to inspect the bunkers, not far from his mother’s village near Lake Balaton: empty, stripped to their twenty-foot-thick concrete walls. He liked to think of it as an independence gift.