I SLUM CLEARANCE
A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth-or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing—almost all housing—consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow. Other waters mysteriously dried up because of dams and developments elsewhere. The air reeked of sickly lignite fuel, which in Leipzig was strip-mined on the edge of the city. Local wits argued that in Leipzig one could see what one was breathing. At Bitterfeld the groundwater had a chemical reading mid-way between vinegar and a car battery. In Cracow, the sun disappeared on hot afternoons behind a veil of industrial fumes.
Shortages of basic foodstuffs, as well as consumer goods, meant the exhaustion and ill-temper of interminable queues. People seemed grey and shabbily dressed, especially whenever their garb echoed some long-forgotten Western fashion. Pervasive alcoholism was reflected not in hooligans having a carnival, for that would have been illegal, but in rheumy-eyed figures morosely clutching a drink in grim station bars. What British cultural critic Jonathan Meades called the ‘pissocracy’ was not confined to the drunks in the Kremlin, but reached via the workplace to park benches. Food poisoning was routine in canteens and restaurants. Uniquely in the industrialised world, the average age of mortality decreased, not just because people were prematurely worn out, but because of dangerous and dirty working conditions and substandard health services. All of this may suggest nothing strange to a housing estate in Cardiff or life in the decaying suburbs of Paris. But far more than indifferent living conditions was at stake.
The countries of the Communist bloc were ruled by unelected gerontocracies, and their younger clients, who lived in hermetically sealed government quarters, like Wandlitz in East Berlin, venturing out in motorcades with curtains obscuring the passengers from curious eyes. Although their living conditions did not aspire to the opulent vulgarity of Western nouveaux riches, they had private hunting parks and access to shops filled with Western luxuries. But, again, many politicians in Western democracies treat high office as pigs regard their troughs. The most striking evils of the Communist regimes were hidden away in jails, camps, asylums and orphanages, while the police state had listening devices and shadowy watchers to remind people of their existence, whether through blackmail and intimidation or through the ubiquitous men with cameras. Notoriously, East Germany had to build an immense wall to prevent its own citizens fleeing the worker–peasant paradise. It also arbitrarily expatriated people, or sold them to West Germany for large sums of money in what amounted to a form of human trafficking.
Historically, slum clearance was never solely an exercise in replacing insalubrious dwellings with improvements, but also involved reform of the moral and social evils that slums engendered. That is where the analogy takes off. East European dissidents reversed this process by deciding to eradicate moral disorders before watching as the vast slum created by Marxist–Leninism crashed down as a result of factors intrinsic as well as extrinsic to the system. That approach involved standing Marxist materialism, as well as other progressive delusions, on their head in favour of such intangibles as mind, values and spirit.
Naturally there were major external actors who contributed to the success of these popular revolutions, but this should not detract from the courage of less well-known figures within the societies concerned. The history of the revolutions in 1989–90 is also that of dissidents, many of whom were from the working class, it being academic whether they or intellectuals played the more important part. Some of the workers were highly intelligent, if that means they thought deeply about things, rather than possessing one of the regimes’ qualifications for mindless conformism. In what meaningful sense was the wily dissident electrician Lech Walesa less ‘intelligent’ than some conforming dullard with a history or philosophy PhD written according to the spurious ‘laws’ of Marxist–Leninism? In some countries, ‘intelligence’ almost correlated with failure to oppose the regime, it being remarkable how few East German students, for example, participated in the popular demonstrations that brought the regime down.
Sometimes major events have very small beginnings that at the time few notice. Paradoxically, just as the post-Stalinist Soviet leadership thought it had secured long-term legitimacy for its outer Empire, it conceded what it cynically regarded as a small ancillary cost that could be subsequently ignored with impunity.
The background to this development lay in the heyday of détente in the 1970s, when Western leaders lined up to find permanency and virtue in Marxist tyrannies. The European Conference on Security and Co-operation’s Final Act, signed in Helsinki in August 1975, turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who imagined it had consolidated all that Stalin had gained at Teheran and Yalta by persuading the West to renounce military intervention in the affairs of signatory states, even though it was the Soviets themselves who had violently intervened in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
What were called ‘Basket Three’ of these deliberations contained a number of provisions regarding human rights, together with monitoring mechanisms to police them. Principle VII committed signatories ‘to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’.
This provided a cloak of legitimacy to a number of human rights groups, which in the teeth of Communist repression could claim that the regimes themselves had twice signed up to these values, not only at Helsinki, but in their own constitutions. Since the constitutions notionally guaranteed various rights, why not insist that these regimes observe their own laws? That was one of the chief considerations for the Czech signatories of Charter 77, named after the ‘year of the political prisoner’ in 1977. Its three spokesmen included the playwright Václav Havel and the philosopher Jan Patocka, who would die after an eleven-hour police interrogation worsened an already bad case of flu.1
Realists on either side of the Iron Curtain may have preferred to regard the Cold War as a game of chess, played out by experts versed in such arcana as arms controls or nostalgic for the era of the post-Napoleonic Congress System when ordinary mortals did not count. But the Helsinki Accords ensured that questions of freedom and morality would continue to matter. In the long term, they were the only product of the era of détente to yield results, because through such provocations as the invasion of Afghanistan and the stationing of intermediate SS20 missiles in the Ukraine the Soviet Union certainly failed to observe its spirit.
At the time, détente had such widespread purchase that even the Holy See was not immune, a worrying example of the Churches’ general permeability to evanescent secular ideologies, as represented by clergy joining in hysterical clamour against nuclear weapons that had ensured that neither superpower risked direct confrontation.
Breaking with the implacable and principled anti-Communism of Pius XII, Paul VI encouraged dialogue with the Communist regimes, granting many of their leaders private audiences and acting as if the arbitrary rigidities of Yalta and beyond were past repair or recovery. There was even talk of guiding Marxism back to its ‘Christian’ roots. While such uncompromising figures as Mindszenty were replaced with younger moderates, the maverick Yugoslav dictator Tito was received by the pope in 1971, the first Communist leader to be accorded this honour, followed in the next four years by Nicolae Ceausescu, Todor Zhivkov and György Lázár, encounters that would have had Pius XII whirring in his grave. In the eyes of Vatican diplomats, the need to avert thermonuclear war was paramount, as was a naive belief in the gradual convergence of the two antagonistic political systems, something they had picked up from the wisdom of social ‘science’.
II SPIRITUAL VOICE OF THE WESTERN WORLD
It has become fashionable to deprecate the role of ethics, religion and people power in the anti-Communist European revolutions.2 Actually, the development and diffusion of a highly subtle way of thinking about, and living within, totalitarian regimes was at the heart of things, and could not have been otherwise, once Karol Wojtyla, the cardinal archbishop of Cracow, was elected the first Polish pope in October 1978. Some people like to downplay his contribution to Communism’s collapse. The KGB and Bulgarian secret service did not agree since in 1981 they recruited a fanatic Turk to kill him.
Wojtyla brought his nation’s sophisticated Catholic traditions of moral philosophy, as well as an absolute abhorrence of Communism, to the Vatican, together with what proved to be a highly useful aptitude for showmanship, as he was an accomplished actor. Wojtyla’s words and writings resonated in a society where everyone faced explicit moral dilemmas every day. As the future Solidarity leader Lech Walesa would comment: ‘The invocation of a moral order was the most revolutionary response that could be made to the increasingly dogmatic socialism practised in Poland, and people were caught up in this wave of moral reawakening—each expressing it in his or her own way, at work or in the home, in professional and in personal relationships.’3
A record in cultural activism is one important clue to the subsequent effectiveness of the pope in dealing with Communism. His early adulthood was spent under Nazi occupation, where Wojtyla was part of the non-violent Christian Resistance that tried to sustain an independent Polish culture that the Nazis had sought to eradicate by reducing the Poles to illiterate helots. Having suffered so much death, the surviving Polish Catholic clergy emerged with enormous popular credibility, in a country that was 96 per cent Roman Catholic as a result of the wartime (and immediate post-war) loss of Germans, Jews and Ukrainians. Catholic ranks also extended well into the Communist Party, which, however appallingly it acted, was never entirely hardened to appeals of conscience.4
Wojtyla was a charismatic, practical man, who spent the war working in a limestone quarry and a chemical plant, and a gifted scholar with deep reserves of spirituality. His doctorate was on philosophical aspects of moral choice, the very area that would be so crucial to later opponents of the Communist totalitarianism that succeeded Hitler.5 As archbishop of Cracow from 1964 onwards, cardinal Wojtyla, as he became three years later, intensified contacts with the intellectual milieu he came from, including representatives of the secular non-Communist left, but also with the industrial workers of the new suburb of Nowa Huta around the Lenin Steelworks. This concrete monstrosity was a deliberate act of social engineering designed to swamp the old city’s conservative Catholics with the ‘new’ socialist man.6
Unfortunately for the Marxist regime, the workers were as devoutly Catholic as the peasants whom industrialisation and modernisation were intended to render obsolete. Their migration from the countryside had been too precipitous for them to be effectively reconstructed as socialist ‘new man’ overnight. The workers’ desire to erect a church in the midst of this Marxist–Leninist concrete paradise became a bone of contention between Church and Party for nearly twenty years. Wojtyla defiantly conducted open-air masses until what was called the Ark Church was dedicated in 1977.
His election to the papacy in October 1978, following the unconscionably brief pontificate of Albino Luciani, or John Paul I, culminated in a four-hour installation mass, deliberately drawn out to stop the Polish Communist Party’s media arm from giving it their own negative gloss. John Paul II’s final words were ‘Be not afraid,’ one key to understanding the impact of his papacy upon those who fought for liberty under totalitarianism. Another was his constant insistence that it was not enough to be against Communism; one had to think in terms of the moral renewal that would accompany this. Parallel criticism of Western materialism, and espousal of the dignity and rights of labour, made him difficult to position in conventional political terms.
The diplomat Paul VI’s pursuit of what in German is called ‘Ostpolitik’ was quietly discarded. The difference John Paul II’s election made in eastern Europe is rather tellingly illustrated by the evolution of cardinal Frantisek Tomásek of Czechoslovakia, who had formally denounced Charter 77; by 1984 the same figure blessed its spokesmen.7 John Paul II spoke in terms that resonated with many dissidents, regardless of their ethnic, political or religious background, for as the former archbishop of where Auschwitz is situated he was acutely conscious of the need for repair in the Church’s relations with the Jews. They were ready for the message in the sense that someone like Adam Michnik had transcended the visceral anti-Catholicism of many Jews and among the secular left intelligentsia. In that respect, Michnik’s book, The Church, the Left and Dialogue, published in France in 1977, represented a landmark, for forces that the regime had managed to keep inimical coalesced in an alarming fashion.8
John Paul II constantly reiterated the importance of human rights, pressing governments to enforce the Helsinki Accords. Coming from a city with a Christian history of nine centuries, he emphasised both Europe’s common Christian culture—using the metaphor of two lungs without which East and West could not breathe—without neglecting the national distinctiveness with which that manifested itself. As this highly cultured man remarked, Shakespeare was both essentially English and profoundly universal, something he knew from his days as a keen amateur actor. This implied that Marxist–Leninism was an alien and evanescent doctrine dealing in vapid universalising generalities that bore no resemblance to its grim reality. The pope knew that to challenge it one had to stress what was more rooted and satisfying.
Wojtyla had noted the effectiveness of this approach between 1957 and 1966, when cardinal Wyszy ´ nski’s Great Novena, in the long run-up to celebration of a millennium of Polish Catholicism in 1966, effectively denied the Communists’ version of historic time, while focusing minds on a rival range of visual symbols like the Black Madonna of Czestochowa and the Church’s own calendar, feasts and processions. As an actor, Wojtyla had a keen feeling for the theatrical.
The Polish Catholic Church, and not the Polish People’s Party, was the popularly acknowledged guardian and repository of the nation’s identity, just as the Church had been during the era when Poland had no statehood between 1794 and 1918. By the 1970s, this defiance had become so worrying to the Party’s cultural functionaries that they deliberately manufactured secular ceremonies that parodied the much more popular Christian exemplars. State officials were paid monthly bonuses to drum up takers for ‘name-giving’ (baptismal), ‘honorary guardianship’ (godparents) and ‘personal identity-card awarding’ (confirmation) ceremonies to augment compulsory civil marriages.9 With mounting desperation, Edward Gierek’s government essayed a thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the Communist regime (in 1974) highlighting the guest of honour Leonid Brezhnev, and then a thirty-fifth-anniversary celebration (in 1979) which omitted the international (big) brotherly element in favour of the Communists’ version of patriotism.
By the late 1970s there were three further actors on the international scene. After decades of centrist drift, the conservative right had come to power in the US and Great Britain, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. These were highly imaginative thinkers, whose outlook had been respectively shaped by domestic experience of equivocation and soul-searching in the US of the Vietnam era and Britain’s decades of managed decline. They took on a whole corpus of ‘progressive’ assumptions and shibboleths in both domestic and foreign policy terms, with Thatcher earning the undying hatred of Britain’s left-wing Establishment in the universities and the BBC. Rejecting much of what passed for academic as well as political wisdom, Reagan wittily remarked that détente was ‘what farmers have with turkeys before Thanksgiving Day’. He totally rejected the inevitability and permanence of Communism. In a major speech at Notre Dame in 1981, he said: ‘The West won’t contain Communism, it will transcend it. It won’t bother…to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.’ That proved prescient.
Both leaders were highly informed about eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, relying on the knowledge of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes, rather than the dazzling political insights of Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Pinter and the entire field of academic international relations. Western sophisticates, including Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, were snobbish about the gun-slinging ‘cowboy actor’ Reagan and the handbag-bearing ‘housewife’ Thatcher, thereby underrating not just their intelligence and single-mindedness, but the significance of their long record of political activism—in Reagan’s case as a labour leader and industrial motivational speaker. Neither leader was conventionally religious, but both had a Churchillian sense of right and wrong, and when they spoke of ‘freedom’ they meant it, even if that moral clarity was not always evident in Reagan’s dealings with Central America and Iran. Both signalled a readiness to use military force, whether by bombing the absurd Colonel Ghaddafi or sending a battle fleet thousands of miles to defend a few miserable South Atlantic islands.
They also proved sympathetic to the networks in the West which ensured that the little flame of freedom was never entirely extinguished in the Soviet Empire. Magazines such as Encounter and Index on Censorship made it their business to follow events in the Communist world. Individual writers of great stature ensured that there was no excuse not to know, from Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, via Arthur Koestler, to Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, and above all Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novels and his factual Gulag Archipelago with its unforgettable opening about hungry gulag zeks horrifying Soviet archaeologists as they fried up fossilised fish. Leszek Kolakowski, the exiled former professor of Marxism at Warsaw university, learnedly demolished the high texts of the dogma in his path-breaking Main Currents of Marxism. Why, he asked, bother with a substitute religion when Christianity provided a real one?
In addition to talking frankly about freedom, Reagan restored a moral tone to international affairs, most memorably when in March 1983 he referred to the USSR as the ‘evil empire’—against the advice, as it happens, of Robert Conquest. While that led the Soviets to imagine that they were dealing with a US president crazed enough to launch the bomb, paradoxically Reagan had a horror of nuclear weapons, and consistently urged on the Soviets the need to eradicate them through effective anti-ballistic missile defences. That idiosyncratic offer in the form of the Strategic Defence Initiative—for deterrence had relied on the absence of just these systems—unlocked the frozen cage of the Cold War in the twofold sense that it denied its permanence while forcing the Russians to realise that they could never compete with America in the most advanced computer and laser technologies. It did not matter whether or not such a system was feasible; after all, for the first twenty years of the Cold War the Soviets had bluffed the West into imagining that they had a much greater nuclear arsenal than was the case.10
There was one further significant individual. After 1985 Reagan and Thatcher found themselves dealing with a new, charismatic Soviet leader possessed of a relatively open mind as well as a pulse. Realising that to Europeanise Russia he would have to de-Sovietise eastern Europe, the fifty-four-year-old general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signalled that the rulers of the outer Empire could no longer rely on Red Army tanks as their trump card in their dealings with their own peoples. It is worth stressing that the abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine was effective from 1981 onwards, when the Soviet Politburo ruefully acknowledged that it could not send troops into Poland without having to fight the Polish armed forces as well as the civilian population. Gorbachev made this explicit.11
The rest of Gorbachev’s vision of a humanised and reformed Marxist–Leninism was hopeless: a slackening of the reins of Party control over managers and technocrats; a liberalised private small-business sector; co-option of the more biddable elements of the opposition into a reformist front without surrendering the hegemony of the Communist Party. He was a tragic victim of an illusion. As he beguiled and bewitched the world stage, a submarine went down with all hands; the Ukraine and much of northern Europe were hit by the toxic clouds of Chernobyl; and the Red Army disintegrated into a drunken or drugged rabble in the vast strangeness of Afghanistan, in graphic illustration of the cost to the USSR of imposing Communism on people who rejected it. In desperation, from 1985 onwards, Gorbachev took private economics lessons from the US secretary of state, the Stanford economist George Shultz, an appalling indictment of real existing socialism’s total systemic failure. Of course, it was not just about a mere lack of competitiveness, as if the USSR was like some factory wedded to older ways that could be changed. Communism was morally as well as economically bankrupt. During the twentieth century over a hundred million people lost their lives around the world in the course of this monumental failed and futile experiment with human nature.
III BEING A DISSIDENT
Several of John Paul II’s concerns with cultural and spiritual transformation also preoccupied many of the future leaders of eastern European (and Soviet) dissent. It was vital to have a keen sense of good and evil, to ‘shake that evil off, escape its power and to seek the truth’ as the Czech Václav Benda had it. That involved calling things by their proper names. While leftist anti-anti-Communist Western scholars split hairs over what to call Communist systems, dissidents who had to live under them eagerly embraced the Western concept of totalitarianism. So did Gorbachev for that matter. Rather than finding some relativising explanation for inhumanity, why not attach a perfectly serviceable name to it, while also acknowledging the existence of dark forces in human affairs? This led to a much more fine-grained analysis of the corrupting impact of Marxist–Leninism than any number of social ‘scientific’ studies, most preoccupied with attaching meaningless neologistic labels to things that European Christian culture had already given names for. Self-knowledge helped too. By acknowledging that Communism was capable even of corrupting its opponents, dissidents were more fully able to combat it.12
This quiet moral transformation involved living life as if the oppressive cope of Marxist–Leninism did not exist, or was moribund, while creating and expanding spaces so that ‘civil society’ could function within a system that—having failed to politicise every aspect of human affairs—had settled for docile acquiescence. First isolated individuals, followed by larger groups, began to stand up, straightening their spines, until the day when the Communists became an isolated clique whose primary loyalty was to an alien power. No one not involved should underrate the heroism of those involved, least of all Western intellectuals who in a fit of self-dramatising conceit created Charter 88 and the like in free societies.
A major individual effort was involved in shrugging off the quotidian moral complicities, and the easy acceptance of major lies about the past, present and future, that such a regime required to shore up its illegitimacy, for like a tumour Marxist–Leninism had insinuated itself not only into such concepts as peace and internationalism, but into nationalism and patriotism too. To dissent was to have secret policemen on one’s tail; searching one’s home and rooting through the pages of each book; or being hauled in for hours of interrogation in the middle of the night. All personal relationships could, potentially, result in betrayal by people one loved, as many in East Germany—where the Stasi had perfected technologies of control—were shocked to discover.
People had to keep the political equivalent of a Bach keyboard variation ringing clearly in their heads, to blot out the ambient ideological Muzak with its bogus messages of happiness, goodwill and progress. The reality was of a privileged Party elite, with its own shops and marks of favour, with a two-tier system of shops for everyone else, such luxuries as coffee only being available in PEWEX shops that took hard currencies. Most shops had lengthy queues snaking around the block, including those organised by committees, whose members took it in turns to hang around on the off-chance that rolls of coarse brown lavatory paper or a refrigerator might turn up, despite the long trail of loss stretching from the distributors to the factory backdoor. Even if people managed to get that refrigerator, should it break down there were no guarantees, no one to complain to, no repairs or spare parts, no consumer watchdogs, and no competitors to turn to for a new one. As well as no choice, there was frequently just nothing. Or rather one week there would be a glut of shaving cream, but no razor blades; the next week, razor blades but no shaving cream. More generally, any social mobility that the system had encouraged, mainly through the huge post-war population transfers after the ethnic cleansing of the Germans, had ground to a halt. Young people, who were both better educated and more curious about the wider world than their parents, found their upward trajectories blocked by those the regime had already privileged. Significantly, a third of the workforce that would flock to Solidarity were under twenty-five when the Revolution happened. They knew of the existence of a wider world, with their wages docked in support of Cuba or Vietnam, but they could never visit it.
Industrial conditions were generally appalling; the point of the official trades unions was to communicate the wishes of the Party to the workforce, rather than to represent the workers’ grievances to the Party employer. Marxist historians who write about these things peculiarly avoid such matters as conditions at work, housing and welfare, but then the only workers they know are in the abstract.13 After a day’s gruelling labour in unhygienic and unsafe conditions, those workers not crammed together in hostels caught the single bus that wheezed up to the suburban housing barracks. Despite a high divorce rate, families lived cheek by jowl in cramped conditions, with parents and unwanted partners crammed together. The one telephone kiosk for thousands of people rarely functioned, and was rigged so as to make only local calls, if you could find it at night in the absence of street lighting, and there was no lateral communication between individual apartments except by revisiting the ground and then working back upwards. It was telling that flats that had been deliberately constructed with every inconvenience for the Nazi occupiers (such as bathrooms that were poky and airless) by wartime Polish builders were considered highly desirable in the 1980s. Admittedly there were small oases of comfort amid the ambient grey of societies without advertising. Party officials either lived in large pre-war apartments, in purpose-built quarters, with communal gardens and swimming pools, or if they were really important in large villas in areas cordoned off with signs saying ‘Military Area: Entry Strictly Forbidden’. First secretary Gierek, who had the state build a house for him for twenty million zlotys, which he promptly purchased for four million, also had children from a neighbouring orphanage relocated to cut out unwelcome noise. The state picked up the tab for maintenance of elite housing, it being impossible for any ordinary citizen simply to summon an electrician, carpenter or plumber. The Party elite could also avail itself of special clinics, pharmacies, sanatoria and reserved wards in public hospitals, while the rest of the population had to make do with dirty, poorly equipped facilities, where one had to bribe a doctor to be treated, always assuming that he or she could lay their hands on drugs or hip-replacement joints. Despite having two hundred thousand inhabitants, there was only one hospital with a thousand beds in Nowa Huta.14
Newspapers, magazines and books had to be read through an ideological filter—assuming that they actually contained some coded references to the truth—or better yet, not read at all, which necessitated alternative sources of uncontaminated information. Radio Free Europe, Radio Vatican and the World Service foreign language broadcasts of the BBC provided channels of uncorrupted information, although strenuous efforts were made to jam their signals, or to assassinate broadcasters whose criticisms delved too deeply into the miasma of dynastic Communist corruption. The Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed with a lethal injection from an umbrella in the middle of London.
The recreation of an autonomous culture was a major achievement of intellectual dissenters. Since the universities were in the hands of the embourgeoised ideological soulmates of the West’s tenured radicals—that is, corrupt, conformist mediocrities armed with their Party lapel badges and cards—dissidents created ‘flying’ alternatives in which ‘heretical’ thoughts could be aired in people’s flats, sometimes with visits from such Westerners as the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. Theatre people like Kenneth Tynan or Tom Stoppard kept up contact with Václav Havel. Samizdat publishing provided an alternative to the flood of cheap official books, enabling small circles of people to become acquainted with the thought of such writers as Havel and Michnik. In Poland, where censorship was lighter than elsewhere, Tygodnik Powszechny became the paper of record for dissidents. But there were myriad underground newspapers, such as KOR’s Bulletin, the name a conscious echo of the wartime Home Army paper, or Robotnik aimed at the workers, all produced by very brave people operating in basements and attics. Two things are worth adding at this juncture about dissidence under Communist regimes in eastern Europe.
Firstly, the concentration on moral, cultural and indeed environmental issues denied Communists the ground on which their skills in coercion and manipulation would have operated to their advantage. In their worldview, culture was a secondary by-product of profounder economic and social forces, so to treat it as the priority was tantamount to deranging their thought processes. Acting as if Communism did not exist, or could be ignored, proved a more effective tactic than a head-on-collision with these regimes, as had been tried and had failed in 1953, 1956 and 1968. Why pick an open fight with a dying man? Secondly, the renunciation of violence not only recognised the asymmetrical balance of power, but in itself delegitimised Marxist–Leninist fantasies of heroic revolution, which further confused these regimes’ responses. As they had become heavily dependent on Western loans to help their ailing economies, they were taking risks whenever they bludgeoned or murdered obviously non-violent dissenters. The election of the first Slav pope, with its inevitable refocusing of world attention on eastern Europe, ensured that any repression in that half of the continent would attract the full glare of publicity, especially because few attempts were made to curtail the movements of representatives of the Western media.
Most crucially, the creation of enduring contacts and viable coalitions between intellectuals and manual workers not only denied Communist regimes the gambit of divide and rule (especially if they could point to dissident intellectual Jews so as to push the buzzer of latent antisemitism) but also enabled opposition movements—which deliberately kept their organisations loose or nebulous—to transcend classical divisions between right and left. There clearly were major differences of opinion, but these were muted in favour of the more pressing struggle against Marxist tyranny. The presence of manual workers in coalitions of dissidents who talked about human rights and religious freedom delegitimised regimes whose public propaganda was ostentatiously ‘workerist’; the sturdy wielders of axe, drill, hammer or shovel were not supposed to kneel in prayer or go into raptures about the Polish pope. These enthusiasms caused consternation in some perplexed foreign circles. German and French leftists, together with the British Communist-dominated National Union of Mineworkers, rushed to dub the worker activists of Poland’s Solidarity movement ‘Fascists’, their catch-all term for anyone who inexplicably rejected their ultimately economistic view of the world in which workers were supposed to be concerned with bread-and-butter issues. Certainly, dissident workers were concerned about prices, wages, working conditions and pensions, but they also insisted on an impressive range of basic freedoms for which cheap refrigerators were not a worthy pay-off.
IV WAR OF THE SYMBOLS: SOLIDARITY
The route to this historic alliance between workers and intellectuals was stained with bloodshed. Bread-and-butter issues may have triggered the initial uprisings, but they soon evolved in new directions. Shortly before Christmas 1970, the Gomulka regime in Poland hiked food and fuel prices without a commensurate rise in wages. The workers in what had recently been renamed (to save a manager’s job) the Lenin Yard at Gda ´ nsk went on strike, which after police intervention led to violent confrontations. Lech Walesa, a young electrician, made his debut mediating between striking workers and the militia, who eventually deployed machine guns and tanks. On 16 December the Polish army shot down striking workers, killing twenty-eight (that being the lowest estimate of fatalities) and wounding twelve hundred more. Thousands of people were arrested and interned. Priests helped trace people who had disappeared, and recorded burials carried out by the secret police at night. Trouble spread along the coast to Gdynia, Sopot and Szczecin. In Szczecin the workers burned down the Party district offices, the militia headquarters and the District Council of Trade Unions buildings.15 As a result of these uprisings, Gomulka was dismissed and replaced as Party first secretary by the younger Edward Gierek whose temporarily effective pitch was all hands to the pump to stop the ship sinking. While workers grudgingly returned to work, a further strike by women textile workers in Ló$$$z forced the government to rescind the price increases. Having begun with promises of a little Fiat and housing for everyman, Gierek’s honeymoon gradually turned into a fractious divorce from the Polish people whose name he so readily evoked.
Gierek sought to raise loans on the international capital market, so as to modernise the economy and pay back the loans through exports. Recycled petrodollars would support wage rises and price controls. This resulted in disaster, since the inefficient Polish economy was incapable of producing goods of a standard world markets required. By the late 1970s Poland had levels of debt rivalling Latin America at US$23 billion. The cost of serving this debt mountain rose from 27 per cent of export income in 1974, to 43 per cent in 1975 (and 70 per cent in 1980). More loans, at punitive interest rates, were incurred just to pay the interest on the original debt.16 Six years after the abortive price rises, Gierek raised them again in the summer of 1976. The price of meat went up by 100 per cent. Riots occurred at the Ursus Tractor Factory in the capital, while in Radom armament workers burned down the local Communist Party headquarters. Although these price increases were revoked, this time the police, Security Service and Party militia pursued a vindictive campaign against those involved that led to many detainees being physically assaulted. These brutalities led a group of intellectuals, including Jacek Kuro ´ n, Bronislaw Geremek and Adam Michnik, many of them social democrats by political avocation, to found the Committee for the Defence of the Workers (or KOR by its Polish acronym) which pursued the cause of workers being persecuted by their own Party-state.
In the summer of 1979 John Paul II returned for a triumphal nine-day visit to his homeland. Thirteen million people turned out to hear him, many no doubt agreeing with the miner who said he had come ‘To praise the Mother of God and to spite those bastards.’ There were other encounters of a less agreeable kind. At receptions with members of the regime, John Paul categorically rejected their insistence that the Church had merely cultic functions within society:
Given that [the temporal dimension of human life] is realized through people’s membership of various communities, national and state, and is therefore at the same time political, economic, and cultural, the Church continually rediscovers its own mission in relationship to these sectors of human life and activity. By establishing a religious relationship with man, the Church consolidates him in his natural social bonds.17
At a mass on Warsaw’s Victory Square, the crowd responded to John Paul’s sonorous classical Polish with chants of ‘We want God, we want God, we want God in the family circle, we want God in books, in schools, we want God in government orders, we want God, we want God.’
Following this gigantic anti-Communist plebiscite, the Church was never far removed from the final cycle of unrest to hit Poland. On August 1980, workers at the Gda ´ nsk Lenin Yard went on strike following the dismissal of a crane operator who was a labour activist. Lech Walesa, who had been sacked earlier, climbed back into the yard and took over leadership of the strike committee. The local bishop managed to calm things, by going into this prestige Communist project to say an open-air mass for the strikers below a giant wooden cross which the workforce had made to commemorate the victims of government repression a decade earlier. Since it became obvious that no local deal was going to prevent this wave of unrest from spreading across the country’s entire workforce, the regime concluded the Gda ´nsk Agreement on 31 August 1980, which recognised the rights to strike and of association, conceded construction of a permanent memorial to those workers shot down in 1970, and a relaxation of censorship. Walesa signed the agreement with a huge pen capped off with a picture of the pope.
A National Co-Ordinating Committee of a New Self-Governing Independent Trades Union came into being, called Solidarity for short, under Walesa as its chairman. One of his first acts was to have himself photographed beneath a large cross. A young Gda ´ nsk designer, Jerzy Janiszewski, provided the logo in which red letters on a white ground not only echo Poland’s national colours, but seemed to lean on each other for support.
Government concession of the right to independent trade unions was followed by wildcat strikes and the gradual disintegration of the Party even as it conducted a fitful dialogue with the Solidarity leadership. Three million lowly members of the Party joined Solidarity, while the abandonment of ‘democratic centralism’ meant that at the 1981 Extraordinary Party Congress 90 per cent of the old-guard leaders were rejected by an ‘electorate’ that had hitherto known when to put its hand up. The Russians commenced ostentatious military manoeuvres, code-named Soyuz 81, including landing marines on Poland’s Baltic beaches. In early December 1981, the Solidarity Executive discussed free elections and a referendum regarding Poland’s main external alliance. Walesa demurred. The discussions were heard through intelligence-service listening devices. Fearful that the Russians would intervene militarily, which the grim East German leader Erich Honecker was urging them to do, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had become prime minister in February, and first secretary of the Party in September, began making ominous dispositions. Soldiers sent to the countryside to help distribute food also used the opportunity to record the addresses of Solidarity activists. Jaruzelski met both Walesa and the new primate, cardinal Józef Glemp, in November 1980, to give the appearance that a negotiated settlement was possible. That month Brezhnev warned the general that ‘there was no way to save socialism in Poland’ unless ‘a decisive battle with the class enemy’ was fought. He was probably bluffing since the Soviet Politburo ruled out intervention even as US intelligence was confirming its imminence. As the Kremlin’s chief ideologist Mikhail Suzlov expressed it: ‘If troops are introduced, that will mean a catastrophe. I think we have reached a unanimous view here on this matter, and there can be no consideration at all of introducing troops.’18
Among those who live by sensation, it is often said that US president Ronald Reagan—who came to office in January 1981—initiated intelligence sharing with John Paul II, although the Vatican possessed one of the best information networks in the world. In fact, his predecessor Jimmy Carter had initiated this practice. Secretary of state Zbigniew Brzezinski, himself of Polish extraction, showed the pope US satellite imagery, while Carter warned the Russians that there would be ‘very grave’ consequences for the superpower relationship if they intervened in Poland. At a minimum, the US would prompt world trades unions to impose a total boycott on Soviet air and sea traffic. John Paul II sent a strongly worded letter to Brezhnev, reminding him of the consequences of the violation of Poland’s sovereignty in September 1939, and of obligations that the Soviet Union had solemnly committed itself to at Helsinki. Three months later, Stanislaw Kania and Jaruzelski were summoned to Moscow to learn that the Soviets would not intervene.19
Jaruzelski reassured the Soviets with the prospect of imposing martial law, the details of which he doubtless thrashed out with his opposite numbers in Soviet intelligence agencies. Towards midnight on 12 December 1980 the nation’s three and a half million private telephones went dead and the army occupied the streets, positioning armoured vehicles at major intersections. Ten thousand people were detained and put in internment camps. The leaders of Solidarity, including Walesa, were arrested in what was a cross between a coup and an invasion, and was called ‘a state of war’ in official pronouncements. Walesa was shunted around various Party villas to maintain the pretence that the regime was negotiating with him. The only major resistance was in a mine in Silesia where twelve hundred miners barricaded themselves in the pit, and had to be forcibly extracted by Security Service and ZOMO riot police, at the cost of nine miners killed.
Jaruzelski imagined he could detach the ‘extremists’ among Solidarity’s leaders from ten million followers, who would then be satisfied with economic rewards which the regime could not deliver. Black propaganda was used to discredit the interned Walesa, who the combination of inaction and the Party’s well-stocked food and drinks cabinets had made portly. Hidden cameras recorded him in private conversation with his brother. Snippets were re-edited with the voice of an actor added, which ‘revealed him’ obsessed with the rate of interest his ‘fortune’ would accrue in Vatican banks. This was crude stuff and wholly ineffective.20
The junta tried to conceal its brutal demonstration of police power with a claque called the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth. In fact, the junta relied on curfews, the militarisation of the workforce, the abolition of unions for journalists and film-makers and the suspension of Solidarity to stifle dissent. There was really no coherent strategy beyond that. Jaruzelski thought he could isolate the Church by forcing it to distance itself from opposition ‘violence’, and with the promise that it would have a powerful voice once the old order was restored, perhaps by allowing it to set the moral tone against various manifestations of decadent Western secularism such as pornography. He thought he could pacify the workers with what is known as Kadarisation, that is a Hungarian-style liberalisation of the consumer economy.
He imagined that the West, concerned about Poland’s mountain of external debt, would make ritualised protests before seeing how best it could recoup its money. After all, the West German government said little about martial law—Helmut Schmidt was throwing snowballs from a balcony with Erich Honecker when it was declared—lest it impact on its relations with the GDR or on ethnic Germans throughout the Soviet Union. Germany’s left-‘liberal’ intelligentsia also maintained its customary solipsistic provinciality, or bored on about US policy in Central America, for the purposes of doing down Reagan rather than by virtue of knowing or caring much about people in whose oppression the US colluded there.
All of Jaruzelski’s hopes proved illusory, not least the conviction that the Church would cynically cut a deal to defend its institutional interests. Glemp was not a widely admired figure—some called him ‘comrade Glemp’—partly because people were unaware that, by inaugurating a more collegial style of Church governance than his predecessor Wyszy ´ nski, he had allowed different voices on the episcopal bench to be heard, some of whom notoriously put more trust in Jaruzelski than in Walesa. However, a Polish pope, whose sympathies were with Solidarity, could always be relied upon to trump Glemp’s authority, as he did when he indicated that the Church was not to play the role of neutral arbiter.
The primate also discovered that lower clergy found the vivid reality of the popular movement more compelling than ecclesiastical hierarchy. Indeed, in 1982 Glemp sat stony-faced as two hundred of them attacked his stance in the harshest terms at a meeting of the Warsaw curia.21 One priest began to attract the attentions of the Party-state. Father Jerzy Popieluszko was a young priest in a parish in Warsaw’s Zoliborz district. He was ordered to establish relations with workers in a major steel plant. Typically, this slight and uncharismatic figure wondered why they applauded or wept as he walked in, thinking someone more important must be behind him. After the imposition of martial law, he held monthly masses for the fatherland in his church of St Stanislaw Kostka; these were attended by workers from the capital’s proletariat. Popieluszko addressed crowds of ten or fifteen thousands about the need to resist the evils of the regime. Glemp reminded him of the rather spurious distinction between being patriotic and political. Pressure from the Soviets may have induced the Interior Ministry to do something about him. The regime’s chief mouthpiece, Jerzy Urban, described Popieluszko as ‘the Savanarola of anti-Communism’. If Communist regimes could conspire to assassinate the pope, a troublesome priest was hardly a major challenge. In 1981 the Bulgarian secret police—and probably the KGB and Stasi—orchestrated Mehmet Ali Ag?ca’s attempt to shoot John Paul II as he toured St Peter’s Square in his ‘Popemobile’.22 A first conspiracy to kill Popieluszko in a faked car crash evidently failed. But a week later, on the night of 19 October 1984, his car was flagged down by three security service officers; despite being handcuffed, the priest’s driver managed to escape, which shows how confident the authorities were of getting away with it. Popieluszko was repeatedly beaten up each time the car stopped. He died and was dumped, still bound, in a Warsaw reservoir, his body weighed down with stones. Thousands of people flocked to his church, sceptical of the government’s claims that he had been kidnapped. When news that his corpse had been found came to the crowds in his church, there was a real risk of major public disorder. This was averted. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for his funeral and his grave became a Solidarity shrine. Popular pressure and international outrage forced the regime to hold a trial of the perpetrators, who included a captain in the security service. The prosecution tried to find extenuating circumstances, insinuating that Popieluszko had brought about his own death by making provocative statements.
Father Popieluszko became part of the ad-hoc symbolic arsenal with which the opposition confronted the regime. Its symbols radiated more power than those used by the Party. For example, dissident workers wished to commemorate their friends and colleagues who had been shot down in 1970, a process begun with the laying of simple wreaths—which the security service endeavoured to clear away or obstruct—followed by crosses marking the places where they had been slain. The northern shipyards became the unlikely sites for an explosion of popular poetry, theatre and religious folk art. It is difficult to convey that hour when it was blissful to be alive. The most powerful symbols were the giant steel crosses that replaced earlier wooden efforts in the Lenin Yard. The regime used every conceivable form of chicanery, including calling for a national competition, so as to delay the inevitable, or building a wall, to frustrate the memorial being built or subsequently seen. Workers appropriated the wall’s bricks as souvenirs. The steel crosses, consisting of long tubes welded together in a triangle to evoke Golgotha, symbolised faith, sacrifice and solidarity, while the anchors (symbolising the professions of the sea as well as the wartime emblem of the Home Army) welded on to the top signified hope in the future. Around the base were lines from the Psalms, by the poet Czeslaw Milosz and by the pope. The opening ceremony was designed to marginalise Communism, not only in the sense that it was a religious service, but in the sense that the people and Solidarity’s leaders all faced the monument from the same level, in marked contrast to the Communist practice of having the Party leadership gazing down from a monument upon the serried masses beneath them. Similar monuments to the fallen were erected in Gdynia and Szczecin. They give the lie to the idea that Polish workers were solely concerned with bread and meat prices.
Symbols are no substitute for political victory. This seemed distant. In the summer of 1983, John Paul II made a second visit to his depressed and fearful homeland. His presence encouraged crowds in their chants of ‘Solidarity’. In private sessions with Jaruzelski, the temperature grew heated as the pope insisted that the general resume a dialogue with Solidarity. That, after a delay of five years in which the regime further demonstrated its inability to master Poland’s chronic economic problems, was what eventually occurred in early 1989. Jaruzelski was persuaded of this course by his slippery new prime minister, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, who thought that by bringing Solidarity into government—and especially by handing them economic portfolios—the union would share the blame for the country’s parlous state. Following the round-table talks, the regime relegalised Solidarity, conceded that the Soviets were responsible for the wartime Katyn massacres nearly fifty years earlier, and granted elections in which half the seats in the Sejm were to be freely contested. In these polls, Solidarity candidates won 99 per cent of the seats in what was a rout for the Polish Workers Party. Although Jaruzelski remained as president and commander in chief, having resigned from the Party, a new administration was formed with the Catholic Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime minister of the ‘Polish Republic’. He fainted at his own inauguration ceremony in shock at this personal turn of events. To all intents and purposes, the Party was dead and Poland enjoyed its freedom for the first time since the Second World War. Of course, the defeat of the enemy that had concentrated minds inevitably led to bitter disputes among the victors, who had very different ideas about Poland’s political future. But this should never detract from the way in which this remarkable nation threw off foreign tutelage, and within a relatively brief period established itself as one of the most important states in contemporary Europe.
V A VERY PROTESTANT REVOLUTION?
What became the German Democratic Republic in 1949 was the only Communist state to have a Protestant majority, numbering four-fifths of the population in 1946. By the time the regime collapsed in 1989, it had created the least religious society in the entire Communist system, with only about 10 per cent of the population acknowledging any religious affiliation. But paradoxically the Churches played a significant role in the regime’s downfall.
The two major Protestant Churches consisted of eight regional Churches. Five adhered to the Evangelical Church of the Union—forged by the Prussian state in the nineteenth century between Lutheran and Reformed Churches—the remaining three being combined in the United Evangelical Lutheran Church. Each of these territorial Churches elected its own bishops and synods, and reflected subtle differences in both ecclesiology and theology. Bishops shared power with synods of clergy. Below them were district superintendents with oversight of individual parishes, each of which had an elected parish council. There were many lesser denominations, free Presbyterian Churches and sects.
There were also one million Roman Catholics in the GDR, mostly in the south where many expellees and refugees from Catholic regions of eastern Europe had settled. From the start, the Catholic Church simply refused to accept or co-operate with state socialism, but it also decided not to oppose it actively. As bishop Otto Spulbeck of Meissen put it in 1956: ‘We live in a house, whose structure we have not built, whose basic foundations we even consider false. We gladly contribute, living worthy and Christian lives. But we cannot build a new storey on this house, since we consider its foundations false. We thus live in a diaspora not only in terms of our Church, but also in terms of our state.’ The authoritarian and centralised nature of the Catholic Church meant that it never dabbled with such dubious concepts as ‘the Church in socialism’. The fact that most of the East German Church belonged to larger dioceses in West Germany or Poland helped maintain its independence.23
The Protestant churches were in a much more complicated position. Initially, the majority of clergy rejected the state’s demands for total identification with socialism, but there were significant differences in how the Churches responded to insistent demands that such an identification occur. Some clergy vividly recalled their role under the Nazis, and opted for the stance of being ‘watchmen’, alert to every violation of human rights by the totalitarian state. Others were attracted to the notion of ‘the Church within socialism’ as a way of avoiding marginalised irrelevance. A third group followed traditional Lutheran teaching on the two kingdoms by bowing to the state as ‘the force of order’ and practising political quietism. A further group, who had been influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, thought the Churches should be a refuge for the alcoholic, the old, the weak, the imprisoned and the politically persecuted. And finally there were those who believed in ‘critical solidarity’ with a regime whose overall vision they approved. To make matters as complicated as in reality they were, relations between the regime and the Churches were also affected by generational differences, as people who were already old when the Nazis fell were succeeded by younger leaders who had come to adulthood in the GDR, a process with mostly negative effects on the capacity of the Churches to resist Communism.24
Throughout its existence there was no formal separation of Church and state in East Germany. Indeed, until the mid-1950s, an atheist regime compelled citizens to pay dedicated taxes that it redistributed to the Churches. In addition, the regime paid fees and rents for the Church properties it had expropriated. There was also support for the Protestant theological faculties attached to six universities, and an impressive health and welfare nexus. The largest Protestant Church, for example, controlled 44 hospitals, 105 homes for the disabled and mentally ill, 19 orphanages, 310 community services centres, and 278 kindergartens and nurseries. The state allowed the Protestant Churches to print five major regional newspapers on its own presses, an arrangement that made censorship easier.
Since the Communist regime was virtually flown into Germany by the Russians, incidentally giving the lie to it having ‘resisted’ the Nazis, it began by handling the Churches with tactical restraint. Partly because of contacts established between dissident pastors and Communists in Hitler’s camps and prisons, many of whom were subsequently purged from the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), the SED initially downplayed the antagonisms between Marxism and Christianity. The Soviet Military Administration, which really ruled East Germany, allowed the Churches to carry out their own de-Nazification procedures to weed out former adherents of the German Christians. This honeymoon period continued from 1945 to 1948.
In that year, the state began to interfere in religious instruction and to insist that people work on Sundays. In 1949 it foisted two ‘progressive’ pastors on the Church’s weekly radio broadcasts, which resulted in the Church withdrawing from the programme. Next, schools were forbidden to celebrate Christmas; Stalin’s birthday on 21 December became the obligatory alternative. Christmas became the ‘winter vacation’ and Jesus ‘the Solidarity child’. The money disbursed to Churches was drastically cut, while permission was denied to make up the shortfall through collections. With historical materialism marching into education, by 1952 Bible study groups were banned. At tertiary level both Marxist–Leninism and the Russian language became obligatory for all students, the latter a means of culturally isolating people from England and France. In 1952 the regime closed the borders with West Germany, while bundling 8,300 suspect citizens over the border. More than seventy clergy and laity were arrested as ‘agents’ of Western intelligence services. Christians were subjected to insidiously systematic discrimination in education, employment and welfare. A campaign was launched to use the law to eradicate what remained of the commercial middle class and private farming. The conviction of ‘economic criminals’ allowed the state to take their property. It also resulted in chronic shortages of such basic foodstuffs as butter and margarine. By the end of March 1953 the number of people convicted for trivial offences against ‘the people’s property’ had risen to ten thousand a month, and the number of prisoners more than doubled from thirty-one thousand to over sixty-six thousand within a year.
The chief effect of attempts to ‘build socialism’ in the GDR was that people upped and left. In the first half of 1952, seventy thousand people fled to the West, followed by a further 110,000 before Christmas. Another 330,000 fled in the following year. The trend was so worrying that even Lavrenti Beria, the rapist former head of the NKVD, and member of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership, thought that the GDR might be expendable if a united Germany could be kept neutral. This sobering message was passed on to Walter Ulbricht and others after they had been summoned to Moscow in early June for instruction on how to improve the running of their country. Although they instigated reforms on their return, they nonetheless insisted on a 10 per cent increase in productivity rates, a substantial pay cut that infuriated the very class in whose name they claimed to rule.
On 16 June 1953, construction workers at an East Berlin hospital downed tools. They were joined by more men working at a site on the Stalinallee, who imagined that the first group were being held captive, and then by the huge workforces at three major plants in the south of the capital. They marched on government ministries, tearing down propaganda posters and overturning official cars en route. They demanded the rescission of the new productivity norms, free elections and the resignation of the government, whose representatives—with one exception—were too cowardly to meet the protesters. One hundred and fifty thousand people subsequently went on to the streets in what amounted to a workers’ revolution that soon spread to seven hundred other places. There were calls for free elections and national unification. They attacked security service buildings and prisons, the former task made easier by the fact that the Stasi had been sent into the factories. Western intelligence agencies in West Berlin were taken totally by surprise, although the GDR leadership would subsequently blame them for the uprising.
Since the police and Security Service were in no position to deal with a mass uprising, Soviet tanks appeared on the streets of East Berlin from 17 June onwards. Fifty people were shot—twenty of them by summary firing squads; forty Red Army soldiers lost their lives—most of them executed for refusing orders to shoot German civilians. Three thousand demonstrators were arrested, together with a further thirteen thousand people picked up after the event.25
This revolt, the first against any Communist regime since the war, had two important consequences. First, the head of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi for short), the veteran Communist Erich Mielke—who had carried out political murders in the Weimar Republic before fleeing to Russia—determined that the Stasi would never stare into the abyss again. It would be the sword and shield of the Party, a metaphor it owed to the Polish founder of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. Mielke constructed an enormous secret police apparatus, including what became some two hundred thousand spies recruited from among the population who reported to controllers within the one hundred thousand permanent Stasi officers. It kept files on four million citizens in the GDR and a further two million on people in the Federal Republic, files which ran to a hundred kilometres in East Berlin, with a further eighty kilometres on shelves in the provinces. In Leipzig, the Stasi maintained card entries on two-thirds of the city’s half-million inhabitants. What this meant for dissidents was epitomised by the case of the man who discovered that twenty-two of his close acquaintances, including a cousin, had regularly informed on him.26
The Stasi files were administered by three hundred full-time archivists, with the technology constantly being upgraded. There was even a bottled collection of the personal scents of dissidents—derived from their clothing—whom one might have to send the dogs after. The Stasi was lavishly funded with an operational budget of four billion marks a year. In addition to its imposing headquarters on the Normannenstrasse in East Berlin, it had two thousand safe houses and covert installations from which to photograph people, together with regional offices in each district. Riot police squads—or rather a domestic army, with armoured cars and cannon—were augmented by the four hundred thousand men organised in the Party’s industrial militias which could strike down any future worker protests at source. Among the population at large, the bloodbath in June 1953 suggested the inadvisability of any further insurrections.27
With very few exceptions, clergy kept their distance from the 1953 worker uprising, which became an official holiday in the Federal Republic. Ironically, Edgar Mitzenheim—the brother of bishop Moritz Mitzenheim of Thuringia—was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for taking part in what his brother denounced as ‘Fascist provocations’. While few clergy went that far, their tacit support for the regime reflected the fact that at their meeting with the SED trio on 2 June the Russians had instructed the rulers of the GDR to liberalise their policies towards the Churches with a view to turning the latter into pliable political instruments.
While the Party-state could do little to diminish the faith of older Christians, it could affect the young, especially those raised on vast suburban housing estates where building churches had been overlooked. The regime introduced, dropped and then reintroduced the requirement that all schoolteachers had to be Marxists. It was responsible for remorseless atheist propaganda as well as crude polemics against the manifestly superior Federal Republic. It created a massive youth organisation—the FDJ—to rival Christian youth organisations. In virtually every respect this was a copy of the earlier Hitler Youth, although its creed was ‘anti-Fascism’, the public ideology of the GDR.28 The very young were encouraged to join the Pioneers, where they were inducted into the religious cult of Ernst ‘Teddy’ Thälmann, the Weimar Communist Party leader shot by the SS in 1945, who was presented to children as the Red equivalent of the Protestant Sweet Jesus.
In 1954 the regime inaugurated youth dedication ceremonies—the Jugendweihe—an idea they took over from nineteenth-century secularists. The socialists and Communists of the Weimar Republic had used similar ceremonies, as did the Nazis who introduced them for children joining the Hitler Youth. In the GDR these ceremonies were preceded by the secular equivalent of catechetical classes in which atheism was aggressively propagated. Fourteen-year-olds were informed that religion was a tool ‘for holding down the masses and oppressing them’. They received such books as Nikolai Ostrovsky’s turgid How Steel is Hardened, set in the Russian Civil War, or The Universe, the World, and Mankind, whose title alone must have daunted fourteen-year-olds. This atheist alternative to confirmation ceremonies was supposed to be voluntary, but by 1958 it had become general, so many advantages did it mysteriously confer. There were other pseudo-religious aspects to becoming an adult socialist. A visit to the memorial within the former concentration camp at Buchenwald became a pilgrimage for millions of FDJ members. There they learned about the former prisoners’ ‘Oath of Buchenwald’ and dedicated themselves to the anti-Fascist struggle that lay at the heart of the GDR’s self-understanding. They presumably did not learn that the Soviets had continued to use Buchenwald until 1951 to house prisoners, who included former Nazis as well as many of their former opponents.
By contrast, it was made harder for Christians to bring their children up in the faith of their choice. The 1956 Fechner Decree, introduced by East Berlin’s municipal government, banned religious instruction in the hours before school commenced, and insisted on a statutory two-hour interval after a child had returned home, before evening instruction might begin. Parents and children who were still prepared to learn about Christianity later at night had to get written permission, which was renewable on a tri-monthly basis. The payment of Church taxes became voluntary, while the churches themselves fell into dilapidation, and pastors had to make do with meagre stipends that barely kept them above the breadline.
Up to this point, relations with the Churches had been left to the deputy prime minister, Otto Nuschke, the head of the CDU-East Bloc Party, one of the licensed transmission belts to non-Communist constituencies under the overarching dictatorship of the SED. But in March 1957 Nuschke’s Office for Church Relations was transformed into a State Secretariat for Church Affairs under Werner Eggerath, East Germany’s former ambassador to Romania. His opening communication to the bishops invited them to use Easter services to denounce the nuclear bomb. East German clergy were told to sever their ties with their West German co-religionists, while bishop Otto Dibelius was suddenly banned from the eastern parts of his own diocese. Smear posters linked Dibelius with Heinrich Himmler and a sex fiend called Balluseck. In April 1957 the regime arrested a popular pastor, Georg-Siegfried Schmutzler, who was jailed for five years for ‘agitation to boycott the Republic’, for supporting the Hungarian Uprising, and for supporting the Evangelical Church’s agreement to appoint military chaplains to the West German Bundeswehr. While he languished in prison, bishop Moritz Mitzenheim of Thuringia took the lead in finding a modus vivendi with the regime. The private meeting became the normal mode of communication between Church and Party figures.
In July 1958 Mitzenheim and the SED first secretary Walter Ulbricht issued a joint statement which claimed that ‘the Churches…are in fundamental agreement with the peace efforts of the GDR and its regime’. Ulbricht also averred that ‘Christianity and the humanistic ideals of socialism are not in contradiction’. There were other spectacular betrayals. In October 1958, the eminent Swiss theologian Karl Barth—one of the few Protestant theologians to have opposed Nazism root and branch—wrote an extraordinary letter to Protestant pastors in the GDR, claiming that since West Germany was in the grip of former Nazis and NATO warmongers, they should have no hesitation in giving their loyalty to the East German Communist regime.29
With the progress of time, and the retreating prospect of reunification, several smaller Churches, as well as the Lutherans, formed autonomous organisations within the Communist Republic. The main Evangelical Church resisted pressure to follow, but by 1969 even it had formed the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR. Once detached from Churches in the West, the Evangelical Church found ideological concessions easier. By 1971 its leaders talked about the Church ‘in socialism’ rather than either against or alongside it. Ironically, although the regime seemed to have closed the front door to the Churches in the Federal Republic, it was in reality allowing those same Western Protestant Churches to export huge amounts of goods and services, which in addition to building or repairing churches went to alleviate the plight of political prisoners or to purchase people out of the workers’ paradise.30
Ulbricht’s successor, Erich Honecker, rejected the confrontational approach to the Churches that had been pursued until the late 1950s. Honecker was a former roofer whose involvement with Communism began early. In 1937 the Nazis sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment, from which he emerged in 1945. He was conspicuously inarticulate, and looked and sounded like a sanctimonious schoolmaster, listening to reports from his Politburo colleagues on issues that he and a handful of cronies had rigged privately prior to each meeting. However, he had a keen sense of where ultimate power lay. He established close relations with Brezhnev, and was selected by him as Ulbricht’s replacement when the Russians decided it was time for the old man to go. Honecker began by permitting such minor subversions as pop music, jeans, beards and long hair, as well as allowing people to watch West German television and to use the Deutschmark as a second currency without fear of prosecution. In March 1978 he made various concessions to the Churches, including giving them quarterly access to state television, pension rights for clergy, compensation for expropriated property and permission to build new churches provided this was financed by the Federal Republic.
The subtler approach towards the Churches reflected Honecker’s desire to defuse potential clashes over the introduction of ‘pre-military’ training for fourteen-to sixteen-year-olds—the reality behind the constant exhortations to peace; it also reflected the regime’s reversal of its blanket condemnation of the German past, so as to invent a spurious legitimacy for itself. This was part of a broader emphasis upon the GDR as a separate socialist nation, as reflected in such adjustments as the German Academy of Sciences becoming the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. By allowing selected clergy to travel abroad to meetings of the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, Honecker also hoped to win international recognition for the GDR while having the clergy represent GDR policies.
Paradoxically, at the same time as the regime realised that religion had its practical and symbolic uses, the Churches became magnets for dissent. The quincentenary of Martin Luther’s birth in 1983 was a key moment in the regime’s politicised revision of history, since hitherto the Party had disdained Luther (and much of the historic German past) as an enemy of ‘the people’, at the same time lavishing praise on the Anabaptist ‘revolutionary’ lunatic Thomas Müntzer, who had turned sixteenth-century Münster into a vision of hell. Now, in its efforts to graft itself on to the root stem of Prusso-German history, as well as to cash in on Western tourism, the GDR leadership discovered positive value in the patriotism, and passive political theology, of the great Protestant reformer. But the Churches had moved on from the high-level deals of the late 1970s.
During the early 1980s the Churches became key sites where heterogeneous ecological and peace activists could meet, for any other gatherings of more than half a dozen people required the state’s permission. Churches also had the advantage of possessing telephones with long-distance facilities, enabling contacts to be forged across the GDR, although there was always the risk of there being three callers on the same line. Courageous individual pastors, such as Christian Führer or Christoph Wonneberger, allowed their churches to become shelters for myriad oppositional groups. Some of these people were Christians, others not, but the key point was that the Churches helped them all overcome the intense atomisation which the regime had deliberately fostered, be it isolating and persecuting active dissidents or encouraging individuals in harmless private pursuits. Now they came together in candlelit vigils and prayer, a mode of organisation that was difficult to combat with police dogs and water cannon as the moral balance was so blatantly asymmetrical, while the peaceful forms nullified the entire Communist mythology of violent revolutionary upheaval.
Multiple ambivalences characterised the relationships between the Party-state, the Churches and opponents of the regime. Activists effectively carried out a laicisation of the Evangelical Church, a process called organising ‘the Church from Below’. But at the same time the Party-state regarded this as the ‘theologisation’ of ‘hostile–negative activities’. While some clergy were sympathetic to critics and opponents of the regime, others, often in the hierarchy, worried about the repercussions on the Churches or resented the lay tail wagging the clerical dog. All Churches in East Germany also faced the problem of the progressive secularisation of society, and wondered whether sheltering dissenters might reverse what accommodation with an atheist regime had conspicuously failed to achieve.31
At the St Nicholas Church in Leipzig, where prayer meetings held every Monday evening at 5 p.m. from 1980 onwards became a major focus of opposition, pastors allowed opponents of the regime to camouflage themselves as ‘church groups’, which then co-determined the increasingly politicised content of the prayer services. The strictures of Old Testament prophets against sinful kings developed into free exchanges of information and opinion during discussion periods, then to the posting of lists of people who had been arrested, and finally to confrontations with the Stasi as people debouched from the church into the main square.32
By 1987, the regime was actively concerned about how the ‘temple police’ they had been confident in managing had been suborned by activists and dissidents whom they generically stereotyped as ‘rowdies’. As a member of the Politburo explained to a bishop: ‘At official church offices, people answer the phone saying “contact office”, “Solidarity office” or “co-ordination centre”.’ The forcible closure of the underground Environmental Library within Berlin’s Zion Church in November that year was symptomatic of the regime’s discomfort.
In June 1989 the Ministry of State Security estimated than there were 2,500 hardcore opponents of the regime who met in as many as 160 groups. All but ten of these (the chief exception being the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights) met under the aegis of the Churches. That was why the Stasi went to such lengths to recruit informers throughout the churches, notoriously including senior administrators, and why it planted three listening devices in the home of a single pastor, Rainer Eppelmann.33 If the proximity and ubiquity of the Western media made the use of police force unadvisable, the Stasi hoped to use strategically placed informers to influence the political choices of opposition groups, many of whom wished to create some version of socialism with a human face, a project with more appeal to artists, writers and intellectuals than to the ordinary Manfred.34
Compared with the Poles’ heroic emphasis on morality and liberty, there is something depressingly provincial about the causes espoused by the East German opposition. Maybe that prosaic, predictable quality lies at the heart of revolutions that negated the entire mythology and ‘pathos’ of revolution. Opposition groups harboured by the Churches alighted upon the creeping militarisation of GDR society, which stood in glaring contradiction to the emphasis upon peace in the state’s foreign policy rhetoric. Of course in reality the GDR maintained a sizeable ‘Afrika Korps’ which dabbled in various sub-Saharan tragedies, while the National People’s Army had plans for a quick thrust over the Rhine into France and Belgium. Dissidents called for non-military alternatives to national service that would not blight anyone’s future career, as had been the case with those who had joined ‘construction brigades’, which the regime had conceded in 1964 as an alternative to military service, but which still involved labour on military bases. About four to five thousand people opted for this alternative, or had gone to prison for refusing it. They became one nucleus of opposition. This usually went together with opposition to the introduction of alarming civil defence drills, including the regular sound of sirens, or the appearance of mini-tanks in kindergartens. Those who wanted peace and opposed Communist militarism were vocal in such campaigns as ‘swords into ploughshares’, which the regime duly suppressed. Other opponents denounced the ecological devastation that Communism had inflicted through crash industrialisation, a cause that had become massively fashionable across the inner-German border with the rise of ‘Green’ politics. The outrageous denials of liberty within the GDR animated a third group. They campaigned for the right to emigration (or on behalf of those awaiting exit visas) from a state that was so popular among its citizens that it had surrounded itself with minefields, watchtowers and high concrete walls. The emigration issue introduced a potential fault line in the opposition between those who were desperate to get out and others who imagined that a reformed socialist state might eventuate that it would be worth remaining in. Finally, there were younger people who were fed up with the aged leadership and their middle-aged clones, and who sought the usual range of lifestyle freedoms enjoyed by their counterparts in the Western world. In this context, being a ‘punk rocker’ really was a political statement.
Although the GDR liked to tout its economic successes, claiming to be the world’s tenth strongest economy, in reality, after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, it depended on economic subventions from its richer neighbour, some of which involving buying people freedom from the worker–peasants’ paradise, a squalid trade vaguely reminiscent of human trafficking. The GDR was also fatefully and slavishly reliant on the Soviet Union, whose armies had ultimately created it. The Nazi experience largely accounted for the grovelling of East Germany’s leaders towards the Russian big brother.
By the mid-1980s, however, in order to embarrass the East German regime, its domestic opponents merely needed to invoke Gorbachev, who, ironically enough, became an object of uncritical veneration among East Germans just as Stalin had been before him. The SED regime found itself in the novel position of censoring what appeared legally in Russia, as when a Berlin newspaper called Die Kirche was forbidden to republish an article on religion from Moscow News. In 1988 the paper was censored fifteen times. The media were prohibited from reporting on deliberations at synods, while Stasi personnel set upon a march by two hundred people led by a pastor who were protesting against government repression.
Despite the presence even at the highest levels of Stasi informers in their ranks, the Churches became a major force in the mounting opposition to the regime. In May 1989 they afforded shelter to groups monitoring the results of local elections, in which negative ballots were mysteriously under-represented. In Prenzlauer Berg, in East Berlin, the regime counted 1,998 negative votes, though in reality the figure was 2,659. When two hundred people demonstrated against this fraud outside the St Sophia Church, they were beaten up by the security service.
East Germany ultimately collapsed because it had no external supporters and faced a West German leader, Helmut Kohl, who was more nimble on the international stage than his provincial background or vast bulk suggested. The Hungarian decision not to maintain border fences with Austria—a decision covertly encouraged by aid to Budapest from the Federal Republic—led to a dramatic exodus of East Germans via that breach in the Iron Curtain. Thousands more claimed asylum within West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, while hundreds managed to get inside West Germany’s diplomatic outpost in East Berlin. When the East German regime organised trains to take these people from Czechoslovakia to West Germany so as formally to expatriate them, those fleeing threw their identity papers in the faces of officials. The police had to be deployed to stop less lucky East Germans from storming railway stations to join this licensed exodus.
The Evangelical Church demanded urgent reforms and the introduction of a multi-party system. The GDR’s fortieth-anniversary celebrations turned into a public relations disaster as the Evangelical Church organised prayers for peace and vigils in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden, which were attended by hundreds of thousands of people. An uncomfortable Gorbachev regarded an even less happy Honecker as if he were the spectre at his own feast. What could the regime do about crowds chanting ‘Gorby, Gorby’? The rest of the East German Politburo got the message from the Russian leadership. Although Honecker briefly contemplated Deng Xiaoping’s Square of Heavenly Peace option—in which thousands of protesting Chinese were shot down and crushed by tanks—and so took a sudden interest in Sino-German friendship, a fronde among his colleagues forced his resignation and flight to the Soviet Union. His Marxist comrades in Chile granted him asylum.
His successor, the Uriah Heep figure Egon Krenz, met privately with Church leaders, who were then represented at the round-table discussions to decide East Germany’s future. For a brief interval the GDR was ruled by Hans Modrow, the last ‘reform’ Communist seeking to conserve the GDR as an independent entity—the hint of aspic or vinegar being intentional in the choice of verb in that sentence. A coalition government headed by the Christian Democrat Lothar de Maizière was elected, in which there were four Protestant pastors. There were fourteen pastors in the new democratically elected parliament.
Among the new government’s first acts was the restoration of Christian holy days, including Christmas and Easter, as well as the release of documents showing Stasi penetration and subversion of the Churches. This dealt the Churches a body-blow at a time when they were temporarily riding high. The reunification of Germany meant the end of the independent ‘East German Church’, just as it dispelled the illusion of there being a ‘third way’ between Western liberalism and socialism, an illusion supported by some East German dissidents as well as many West German left-liberals. Reunification also precipitated a flight from the Churches when West German Church taxes—from which people have to opt out explicitly—began to be levied. Many women were also alienated by what appeared to be the West German Churches’ role in extending the Federal Republic’s stringent abortion laws to eastern Länder, where there had been abortion on demand. But this is to slide into the provincialities of German domestic politics. After a brief period of hysterical concern about the recrudescence of a ‘Fourth Reich’, a united Germany duly succumbed to its greedy ingestion of the Communist East and its own corporate-welfare sclerosis. Its moralising neutralism towards the war in Iraq and solipsistic self-preoccupation also ensured that by 2000 it counted for less than Poland in the esteem of the Anglo-Saxon world. For the first time in thirty years, no one was much interested in anything its left-liberal intelligentsia had to say, with even their hand-wringing ruminations on the Nazis becoming a bore to many sophisticated people elsewhere. For the platitudes about globalisation were to take on an entirely new meaning as an extreme version of religion reappeared as one of the major motive forces in human affairs. This takes us to an autumnal dawn in Manhattan when the world really did change.