By the start of 1989 communist regimes had ruled eastern Europe for 45 years. By the end of that year they had all been routed by extraordinary public uprisings. Here, Neal Ascherson, who reported on the momentous events for the Observer, recalls the idealism and anger that drove the protests…
Twenty years ago, a landscape began to tremble. At first, nobody noticed anything special. In January 1989, business was much as usual in the Soviet half of Europe. Strikes in Poland, harassment of East German dissidents, a Czech playwright called Vaclav Havel arrested yet again after a small demonstration. The west had more important stories to think about. George Bush Sr was being inaugurated as president of the United States, and Salman Rushdie was in hiding after the Iranian fatwa. In Moscow, that wonderful Mikhail Gorbachev was pushing ahead with his perestroika and glasnost. (How the Russians must love him!)
In London, a Czech exile named Karel Kyncl wrote an article about the arrests in Prague. He said that he had a funny feeling about Havel. He wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he became president of Czechoslovakia and much sooner than anyone thought. Readers smiled indulgently. Poor old Karel!
Then the trembling increased. The mountains around the cold war horizon began to wobble and fall over. Polish communism went first. Next, Hungary’s rulers published an abdication plan. In August, the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union began to demand independence. In November, Erich Honecker of East Germany was overthrown, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall was breached.
Next day, a palace coup in Bulgaria brought down Todor Zhivkov, the party leader. On 28 November, the Czechoslovak communist regime surrendered to the people. In December, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania was chased from office and shot. And just three days before the end of the year, on 29 December 1989, Vaclav Havel became president of the Czechoslovak Republic.
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The revolutions began in Poland. In 1981, General Jaruzelski had crushed the Solidarity movement and imposed martial law. But everyone knew that the system was mortally wounded. It was just a matter of waiting for it to die. Boys and girls went round wearing tiny Canada badges. The shorthand letters CDN also stood, in Polish, for three words: “Next Instalment Shortly”. Poland’s commercial break ended in 1988, as a fresh wave of strikes broke out. The government, nerveless and divided, eventually re-legalised Solidarity and opened round-table talks with the opposition in February 1989.
The round table sanctioned independent trade unions and provided for multi-party elections in June. Reluctantly, Solidarity accepted that the elections had to be rigged. A block of seats reserved for “official” candidates would ensure a regime majority in the Sejm (the lower chamber of parliament).
But then the people stepped in. I was in the cafe of the Europejski hotel in Warsaw on that June day, as young Solidarity messengers piled our table with billows of exit poll print-outs. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Solidarity had won all but one of the openly contested seats. But in those reserved seats, only two of all the communist candidates had reached the 50 per cent of the vote needed to qualify. The voters had worked out how to destroy them.
That summer morning, the whole game suddenly changed. After 45 years, Polish communism had been annihilated. And the incredible, which was also the inevitable, now took place as negotiations opened to form the first non-communist government in Soviet Europe. On 12 September, a dignified Catholic editor named Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister. The benches of the Sejm were crowded with skinny, laughing young men and women who, only months before, had been dodging the security police.
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Anyone who took part in the 1989 revolutions, or in the resistance movements that prepared the way for them, has to work through mixed feelings today. Disappointments live with an enduring sense that the victory was real and can’t be reversed. In Poland, I remember Marta Krzystofowicz from those times as a graceful, intrepid conspirator for freedom. Today, she is married and has a grown-up daughter. She says: “I have a glass of fresh orange juice, an uncensored newspaper to read, a passport in my desk drawer. It’s enough.”
Nobody regrets being part of a great and good revolution. That soaring feeling, physical and spiritual at once, has often been described. A girl in Leipzig told reporter Steve Crawshaw: “I felt that I could fly!” The Polish poet Galczynski once wrote: “When the wind of history blows/ The people, like lovely birds/ Grow wings …” And in 1989, for a few beautiful months, they flew.
This is how it happened. The three had just summited Denali in a week —“ a lot faster than they expected —“ when I met them in Talkeetna and offered them a ride to Anchorage with their considerable pile of mountain gear. They had some days to spend in the state and not too much money before they flew out of Anchorage. So they planned to stay at a church —“ two of them being priests and all.