Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

Chapter 2

Toppling Communism: Poland and Hungary

The 4th of June 1989. That Sunday was not just a turning point in China’s modern history but also a landmark date for Poland and for Eastern Europe’s evolution out of the Cold War. Many observers proclaimed it as the day of Poland’s first ‘free’ and democratic elections since the Second World War.

Yet that wasn’t quite right: Poland’s exit from communist dictatorship began with a rigged vote gone wrong. The Polish Communist Party – locked since 1980 in an enervating power struggle with the Solidarity trade union movement – conceded the demand for elections in the hope of controlling the process of reform. This was intended to be the reinvention of communism, Polish-style. As US reporter John Tagliabue observed, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the party leader, wanted to ‘use the vote to sweep reform-minded leaders into key posts’ and ‘sweep away apparatchiks resistant to change so that new blood can be pumped into the party’ – as Gorbachev had tried to do in the USSR.[1] The regime’s resort to democracy was largely a facade. All one hundred seats of the upper house, or Senate, were openly contested, but this was the case for only 161 (35%) of the 460 seats in the all-important lower house (Sejm). The rest were reserved for the communists (38%) and fellow-traveller parties (27%). What’s more, thirty-five seats of the communists’ quota were allotted to prominent government and party officials. These candidates faced no challengers and were put on a special, separate ‘national list’. The only ‘choice’ open to voters was to cross out as many names from the various lists as they wished. The regime knew some people would do so but did not expect this on a large scale: hence its requirement as regards the special ‘national list’ that each candidate gain the support of 50% of voters. On the face of it, then, there was no reason to believe that the Polish Communist Party’s monopoly on power would be threatened by this tepid experiment in democracy.[2]

In fact, many people that Sunday had their eyes on what was happening to ‘democracy’ on the other side of the world: a story not of ballots but of bullets. Press and TV were full of Tiananmen, six hours ahead of Warsaw and twelve in advance of Washington. British journalist and commentator Timothy Garton Ash, in the Polish capital to cover the elections, sat that morning in the makeshift offices of the recently founded opposition daily Gazeta Wyborcza (motto ‘Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności’, ‘There’s no freedom without Solidarity’). But he and his Polish friends became mesmerised by footage of dead or wounded Chinese protestors being carried out of the Forbidden City.[3] The New York Times that morning featured a front-page banner headline ‘TROOPS ATTACK AND CRUSH BEIJING PROTEST; THOUSANDS FIGHT BACK, SCORES ARE KILLED’. Tucked away at the bottom of the page, a small box entitled ‘The Polish Vote’ noted: ‘Some say that, four years hence, the opposition will be in control.’[4]

In fact, change in Poland was only hours away. Although official results were not expected until a few days later, it was clear by that evening that the opposition would win virtually all the seats in the Senate. What’s more, in the elections for the Sejm, millions of voters defied the government by crossing out huge numbers of names on the official list, so that dozens of key party functionaries – including the prime minister, the defence minister and the minister of internal affairs – failed to get over the 50% hurdle. This was a stunning outcome: Solidarity had outpolled the communists. Not only was the election a slap in the face for the party, it also undermined the foundations of effective government. The regime had lost control of its reinvention of communism. The people were taking over.

And yet the mood across Poland was not exuberant on that sunny evening. The populace appeared unsettled. Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa expressed anxiety about the implications of what seemed like a landslide for his trade union movement: ‘I think that too big a percentage of our people getting through would be disturbing.’ After a decade of bruising struggle with the regime, he was wary of how the Jaruzelski government would react. Party spokesman Jan Bisztyga warned: ‘If feelings of triumph and adventurism cause anarchy in Poland, democracy and social peace will be seriously threatened.’ He added darkly, ‘Authorities, the coalition and the opposition cannot allow such a situation.’[5]

Garton Ash witnessed how the Solidarity leaders ‘plunged into fevered discussions, tortuous negotiations, and late-night cabals’ – their reaction to the polls ‘a curious mixture of exaltation, incredulity, and alarm. Alarm at the new responsibilities that now faced them – indeed the problems of success – but also a sneaking fear that things could not continue to go so well.’[6] That fear, of course, was heightened by the news from China. Both Solidarity and reform communist leaders had been suddenly and painfully reminded of what could happen if violence broke out – not least given the presence of some 55,000 Red Army troops on Polish soil.[7] And so they did everything possible to avoid it.

The Solidarity leadership now realised that it must dare to engage in national politics – to move beyond its original role of ‘the opposition’ and take on the responsibilities that came with electoral success. The government, too, was stunned by the results. It had solicited a qualified vote of confidence from the people, who instead had delivered a damning verdict on more than four decades of communist rule sustained by the external force of Soviet military power. With Poland entering uncharted waters, both sides were being forced to work together – fearful of risking another Tiananmen if they did not. Solidarity and the communists were seemingly bound in a community of fate – incapable of acting for Poland without each other.

In Moscow, Gorbachev and his advisers were shocked by the news from Warsaw. They had expected that perestroika-style reforms would be met with gratitude in the satellite states, enabling reform communists to stay in charge. The Soviet leadership put the result down to Polish peculiarities. After all, as aide Andrei Grachev remarked, the Poles were the ‘weak link’ in the Soviet bloc. What happened in Poland would most likely stay there.[8] Gorbachev, therefore, stuck to the principles he had enunciated before the UN. The Brezhnev Doctrine was dead; ‘freedom of choice’ was now paramount. The Polish people had spoken. So be it – as long as Poland remained a member of the Warsaw Pact.[9]

No one foresaw the cascade of falling dominoes that would follow Poland’s electoral revolution. But the problems had been gestating for years.

*

In retrospect, the whole Soviet bloc seems like a house of cards. First, because it was rooted in the presence of the Red Army ever since the end of the Second World War. Soviet control of these territories had developed incrementally – rapidly in the Polish case, more slowly, for instance, in Czechoslovakia – but single-party communist regimes tied to Moscow were essentially imposed by force. In 1955 that iron fist was covered with a thin velvet glove in the form of an international alliance among independent states, ostensibly mirroring NATO and colloquially known in the West as the Warsaw Pact, but this was in fact a convenient cover for Soviet dominance. In 1956 the pact backed up the Red Army when it put down the anti-communist protests in Budapest; in 1968 it did the same to crush the Prague Spring. Ultimately the bloc was held together by fear of the tank. Of course, the United States was the unquestioned hegemon of NATO, essential provider of nuclear security and using bases on Allied soil. But, if Western Europe was part of an American ‘empire’, this was empire both by ‘invitation’ and by ‘integration’. In Eastern Europe, however, the Soviet bloc was always ‘empire by imposition’.[10]

What also held the satellite states together (under the umbrella of Comecon, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, founded in 1949) was common adherence to concepts of economic planning that emanated from Moscow. ‘The Plan’ set government targets for total production, for performance within each industry and indeed each factory and farm, thereby eliminating market forces but also personal incentives. Building on wholesale nationalisation programmes pushed through after 1945, the Plan promoted rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of hitherto largely agrarian societies and initially led to a sharp growth of living standards and welfare provision for much of the population. But these gains were soon exhausted and by the 1970s the inflexibilities of the command economies became palpable. Resentment grew about the paucity and poverty of consumer goods. Because the bloc was intended to be autarkic, it was also largely sealed from Western imports, even during the détente years of the 1970s. By then the system was surviving to a great extent thanks to infusions of Western credits and the subsidised price of Soviet oil. A decade later, as the West’s IT revolution was taking off, the inefficiencies of Comecon and the fragility of the Soviet bloc generally seemed transparent.[11]

These grave structural flaws notwithstanding, the ‘revolution of 1989’ was in no way preordained. Neither CIA analysts nor international relations theorists predicted the bloc’s sudden disintegration in 1989.[12] The turmoil of that year was not simply the culmination of popular discontent and protest in the streets: transformation was instigated in part by national leaders, in struggles between reformers and conservatives. There was ‘revolution from above’ as much as ‘revolution from below’. Moreover, national leaders operated in an international context – responding to signals initially from Gorbachev and later from the West. In view of this lateral dynamic we might even speak of a ‘revolution from across’. And one of the most crucial ‘across’ factors that would determine the success or failure of reform would be the actions of the Red Army – because the Soviet military presence was the fons et origo of the bloc as a whole.

Yet 1989 was not just simply a bloc-wide uprising against the Soviet ‘empire by imposition’. Change resulted from specific circumstances in individual states, with their different societies, cultures and religions. The catalysts occurred at different times and unfolded at different speeds, driven by diverse national and local circumstances. Many of their roots lay in long-simmering grievances; and many of the historical reference points came from earlier revolutions, not just in the communist era (Berlin, 1953; Poznan, 1956; Budapest, 1956; Prague, 1968) but also going back, say, to 1848 or 1918.

In the case of Poland[13] nationalist resentment against alien rule was channelled through the Catholic Church, which held a unique position of authority there compared with anywhere else in the bloc. For centuries the church had embodied Polish values against both Russian Orthodoxy and Prussian Protestantism, especially at times when Poland had been erased from the map during various periods of partition. In the communist era, it successfully retained its independence from the state and ruling party and functioned as almost an alternative ideology. The election of the charismatic cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła in October 1978 as the first Polish pope (John Paul II), and his triumphal visit to his homeland the following June, elevated him into an alternative leader who championed human rights and freedom of speech yet who, by virtue of his office, was now resident in the West. Such were his authority and aura that the regime was left virtually impotent as the people discovered a surrogate voice.[14]

Poland also had another well-organised force capable of standing up to the state. Solidarity, the independent trade union, had been formed in 1980 during a rash of strikes that spread along the Baltic coast of Poland from Gdańsk north to Gdynia and then west to Szczecin in response to massive price rises imposed by the government. The crucible of the movement was the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland’s leading port, where some 20,000 workers and their families formed a significant and cohesive force of resistance, and the leader who emerged was Lech Wałęsa, a forceful and feisty workers’ organiser, who became an international icon with his big, bushy moustache. After months of unrest, the regime – now led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski who, unlike his predecessor, had Moscow’s full backing – eventually imposed martial law in December 1981. It was a crackdown Polish-style, but at least there was no Warsaw Pact intervention akin to Prague 1968. Political deadlock ensued. The authorities were unable to eliminate Solidarity, but the outlawed union was in no position to overthrow the government either.[15]

The Polish economy continued in spiralling decline until another round of price hikes in winter 1988 as part of what the government described as a broad programme of economic and political change. But while retail prices jumped 45% in the first quarter of 1988, in the case of household fuel going up 200%, much of the programme ground to a halt almost as soon as it had begun.[16] During the spring and summer strikes and protests spread across the country, enveloping all branches of industry – from the shipyards to the buses, from steelworks to coal mines – at a time when Gorbachev was encouraging reform from Moscow and spurring Jaruzelski into further ‘socialist renewal’. When a new wave of strikes in August paralysed Poland’s key export industries, especially coal and steel, the government’s facade of self-confidence began to crack. ‘A very powerful thing came out of the last strike,’ said Wieslaw Wojtas, the leader at Stalowa Wola, the heart of Poland’s steel industry and epicentre of the 1988 strikes. He and his fellow workers had had the audacity to end the August strike by marching through the city, together with 30,000 of the city’s 70,000 residents, to the local Catholic church. ‘We broke the barriers of fear,’ he declared proudly. ‘And I think the authorities realised we won.’[17]

Wojtas was right. Now that the fear of the tank had dissipated, the Poles could no longer be forced into silent submission. Jaruzelski agreed to discuss economic, social and political reforms. Round-table talks opened in February 1989 with Solidarity, the church and communists sitting as equals around the same bagel-shaped table.[18] On 5 April they reached an agreement that would amend the 1952 constitution and take the Polish polity a long way towards representative government, including a restored upper house to complement the Sejm. What’s more the former would be chosen entirely by free elections, thereby paving the way for the legalisation of Solidarity and the election of 4 June.

Poland – Refolution at the round table

Wałęsa had called off the strikes in September 1988, in return for Jaruzelski’s commitment to round table discussions.[19] Popular protests would never be repeated on such a large scale. From the autumn of 1988 what happened in Poland was ‘entirely an elite-managed crisis, with the masses only stepping onto the political stage to cast their votes, on June 4 and 18, 1989’, bringing to an end the communist monopoly on power.[20] Indeed this was an elite affair on both sides, with the deals largely hammered out between ruling and opposition leaders. Hence commentator Timothy Garton Ash’s neologism ‘refolution’, signifying reform from above prompted by revolutionary pressure from below.[21]

In Hungary in 1988–9, the dynamic was similar though the logic and pace of the narrative were different. There was no rash of strikes to act as a catalyst, and no trade union movement or rallying around the church; instead the crucial trigger was a power struggle within the party elite. In May 1988 the ailing János Kádár, now in his mid-seventies, who had held power since his installation by the Kremlin in 1956, was finally toppled. His departure opened the door for a new generation of communists, all of them in their forties or fifties and mostly reformers.[22] Their outlook was defined by the complex legacy of November 1956, when Soviet tanks had rumbled into the capital, Budapest, to put down popular demonstrations against Russian oppression and to overthrow a reformist communist government that had committed itself to free elections and the country’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. In the bloody crackdown, an estimated 2,700 Hungarians died and 20,000 were injured.[23]

After the Soviet tanks rolled in, the Kremlin expected its puppet Kádár to sort out the mess. His first move was to send some 20,000 people to prison and execute 230, including the ringleaders of the ‘counter-revolution’ (the Soviet bloc’s official description of this popular insurrection). Imre Nagy, his predecessor, was tried in secret, hanged in the prison yard, and then buried face down in an unmarked grave with his hands and feet tied by barbed wire. Although no mourning or commemoration was allowed in Hungary, Nagy became a cult figure for Hungarians and in the West.[24]

Kádár, having proved his loyalty to Moscow, gradually and quietly jettisoned Marxist dogma and allowed a measure of free enterprise. The command economy was loosened to free many goods from price controls and to introduce a new programme for agricultural collectivisation, including revised household plot regulations that permitted people to grow food for the market on private land.[25] This was the origin of Hungary’s so-called ‘goulash economy’ of the 1960s – officially termed the ‘New Economic Mechanism’.[26] Kádár’s economic and political reforms made possible rising living standards and a relatively relaxed ideological climate. He also cautiously opened up Hungary socially; Western radio broadcasts were no longer jammed and the restrictions on travel across the Iron Curtain were relaxed. In 1963, 120,000 Hungarians travelled to the West, four times more than in 1958. All this made the country one of the most prosperous and tolerant states in the Soviet bloc.[27] Kádár became a popular figure – at least for the moment.

By the mid-1980s, however, overshadowed by Gorbachev, the aged Hungarian leader had passed his sell-by date. Certainly that was the view of the younger generation of his party who were keen to embrace the new ideas and dynamism emanating from the Kremlin. Kádár had lost the appetite for change, rather like the Moscow gerontocrats from the Brezhnev era in the early 1980s. During 1987 Kádár tried to shore up his own position as party secretary by appointing to the premiership Károly Grósz, a party functionary with conservative credentials. But Grósz defied Kádár and sided with the reform faction, whittling down state controls and subsidies and encouraging private entreprise. In a climate of slackening financial discipline Hungary acquired the highest per capita debt in Eastern Europe.[28]

Amid the deepening crisis, dissidents grew in confidence, creating with the acquiescence of the party a profusion of opposition groups. It was these new political forces that increasingly set the political agenda. In response, communist reformers defeated the conservatives and replaced Kádár as party general secretary with Grósz at a special party conference in May 1988; the young economist Miklós Németh took over as prime minister from Grósz in the autumn. The strategy of the reformers – like that of their Polish counterparts – was for the party to retreat and renew itself without relinquishing control. As in Poland, these hopes would prove illusory. Hungary would become the bloc’s second domino.

By February 1989 the government’s attempt to co-opt the opposition had failed. What emerged was a kind of competitive cooperation. Many of the opposition groups had evolved into political parties and the Communist Party felt obliged to declare its support in principle for Hungary’s transition to a multiparty democracy. Indeed the party soon abandoned the formal Leninist principle of ‘democratic centralism’, which had legitimised its monopoly on power. Within this fraught political process, historical memory also played a part.[29] The 15th March was traditionally Hungary’s national day – commemorating the outbreak of the abortive nationalist revolt of 1848 against the Austrian empire, which had eventually been crushed by troops of its ally, the Russian tsar Nicholas I. During the communist era, all celebration of that day had been banned for fear of generating anti-Russian protests, but in 1989 the reformist government – hoping to appease the opposition through a collective commemoration and thereby garner credit for its current political course – declared that 15 March would again be a national holiday. However, the government-sponsored event on the steps of the National Museum was dwarfed by a throng of no less than 100,000 people who took to the streets that morning to re-enact 1848.[30]

In this heady atmosphere the regime’s opponents felt emboldened to form an opposition round table (ORT). Eight of these came together, seeking to unify around a clear negotiating strategy in the face of the regime’s own reform agenda. This seemed essential in order to give Hungary’s opposition the same kind of weight and influence as Solidarity had achieved in Poland. After some weeks of haggling about how to conduct the talks, negotiations between the ORT and the government began in earnest on 13 June, and then in secret (again unlike Poland).[31]

Three days later, on 16 June – the thirty-first anniversary of Imre Nagy’s execution – the opposition disinterred his remains and finally gave him and several other prominent figures of the 1956 revolution a public funeral in Heroes Square in the centre of Budapest, amid crowds that even the government admitted topped 200,000. The whole funeral was screened on state television, and was attended by four reformist members of the ruling Communist Party, led by Prime Minister Németh. Not that it did them any good. A twenty-six-year-old spokesman for the ‘Federation of Young Democrats’ by the name of Viktor Orbán paid tribute to Nagy as a man who, though a communist, ‘identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire [sic] and the dictatorship of a single party’. Gesturing at the four communist leaders present, he continued scathingly, ‘we cannot understand that those who were eager to slander the revolution and its prime minister have suddenly changed into great supporters and followers of Imre Nagy. Nor can we understand that the party leaders, who made us study from books that falsified the revolution, now rush to touch the coffins as if they were charms of good luck.’ A note of malice had crept into the proceedings: Orbán’s remarks signalled a sharp rejection of the reform-communist narrative of managed transformation and national reconciliation, and it anticipated the spirit of resentment and the purge mentality that would come to suffuse Hungarian politics.[32]