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The Coast Guard speech completed Bush’s public exposition of his administration’s new strategy toward the European cockpit of East–West relations ahead of the NATO summit in Brussels on 30 May.[93] (#litres_trial_promo) His visionary statements about peace and freedom, about global free markets and a community of democracies, give the lie to later claims that his foreign policy was aimless, merely reactive and ‘too unwilling to move in untested waters’. Above all, he was repeatedly emphasising the place of US leadership in the world and asserting what the administration regularly referred to as the ‘common values of the West’.[94] (#litres_trial_promo) As Bush had said in that scene-setting cameo on Governors Island, he intended to take his time and act prudently in an era when the fundamentals of international relations had been shaken as never before since 1945. ‘Prudence’ would indeed remain a watchword of Bush’s diplomacy but this did not preclude vision and hope. Those speeches of April and May 1989 – often neglected by commentators amid the dramas of the second half of the year – make the ambition of his foreign policy abundantly clear.
But converting ambition into achievement was a different challenge. And his first test was particularly demanding. The NATO summit in Brussels was unusually high profile because it coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the Atlantic Alliance and because it was imperative to come up with an eye-catching response to the potpourri of dramatic arms-reduction proposals Gorbachev had tossed out in his UN speech. To make matters worse, NATO governments had been unable to agree in advance on a joint position, mainly because of fundamental disputes about short-range nuclear forces (SNFs) – those with a range of less than 500 kilometres. And, at a less visible level, the arguments surrounding the NATO summit may be seen as marking a subtle but significant shift in America’s alliance priorities in Western Europe – away from Great Britain and towards West Germany.[95] (#litres_trial_promo)
Britain, represented by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the notorious ‘Iron Lady’ – demanded rapid implementation of a 1985 NATO agreement to modernise its SNFs (eighty-eight Lance missile launchers and some 700 warheads). Her fixation was with their deterrent value and NATO’s defensibility. The coalition government of West Germany, where most of these missiles were stationed, instead pressed the USA to pursue negotiations on SNF reduction with the Soviet Union, building on the success of the superpower 1987 treaty to eliminate all their intermediate nuclear forces (INFs) worldwide. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher – leader of the junior coalition partner the Free Democrats (FDP) – even lobbied, like Gorbachev, for the total abolition of SNFs. This was known as the ‘third zero’ – building on the ‘double zero’ agreement for the abolition of INFs in Europe and Asia. For Thatcher, relatively secure in her island kingdom, these weapons were an instrument of military strategy but for Genscher and for the German left they were a matter of life or death, because Germany would be the inevitable epicentre of a European war. Kohl considered Genscher’s position as far too extreme but he not only needed to appease his coalition partner and calm the domestic public mood by supporting some kind of arms-reduction talks, he also had to navigate around ‘that woman’, as he called Thatcher, and keep the Alliance strong.[96] (#litres_trial_promo)
Both the British and the Germans had been manoeuvring ahead of the summit. Thatcher met Gorbachev on 6 April in London. On a human level, the two of them had got on famously ever since their first encounter in December 1984, before he became general secretary, when she proclaimed that Gorbachev was a man with whom she could ‘do business’.[97] (#litres_trial_promo) At their meeting in 1989 the personal chemistry was equally evident but so were their fundamental differences on nuclear policy. Gorbachev launched into a passionate speech in favour of nuclear abolition and ‘a nuclear-free Europe’ – which Thatcher totally rejected – and he vented his frustrations with Bush for not responding more positively to his disarmament initiatives. The prime minister, playing her preferred role as elder stateswoman, was at pains to reassure him: ‘Bush is a very different person from Reagan. Reagan was an idealist who firmly defended his convictions … Bush is a more balanced person, he gives more attention to detail than Reagan did. But as a whole, he will continue the Reagan line, including on Soviet–American relations. He will strive to achieve agreements that are in our common interest.’
Gorbachev jumped on those last words: ‘That is the question – in our common interests or in your Western interests?’ The reply came back: ‘I am convinced in the common interest.’ Her subtext was clearly that she was the one who could broker the relationship between the two superpowers.[98] (#litres_trial_promo)
Privately, however, Thatcher was worried about the new US president. She had developed a close, if sometimes manipulative, rapport with ‘Ronnie’ and had felt secure about the centrality of the much-vaunted Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ in US foreign policy.[99] (#litres_trial_promo) With Bush, the situation was less clear. It appeared that the new administration’s ‘pause’ also entailed a review of relations with Britain. And she felt that the State Department under Baker was biased against her and inclined to favour Bonn rather than London.[100] (#litres_trial_promo) Her suspicions were not unfounded. Bush, a pragmatist, disliked Thatcher’s dogmatism and certainly did not intend to let her run the Alliance. Both he and Baker found her difficult to get on with, whereas Kohl seemed an agreeable partner.[101] (#litres_trial_promo)
The problem in Bonn was not on the personal level but the political, because of the deep rift within the coalition. In several phone conversations during April and May, Kohl tried to reassure Bush of his loyalty to the transatlantic partnership and that he would not let the SNF issue ruin the summit. His language was almost desperate – a point not concealed even in the official American ‘telcon’ record of their talks. ‘He wanted the summit to be successful … He wanted the president to have a success. It would be the president’s first trip to Europe as president. The president was a proven friend of Europeans and, in particular, of the Germans.’[102] (#litres_trial_promo)
The pre-summit bickering in Europe did not faze Bush. He knew that Kohl’s aim was ‘a strong NATO’ and that the chancellor had ‘linked his political existence to this goal’.[103] (#litres_trial_promo) But the prognostications before the summit were distinctly bleak. ‘Bush Arrives for Talks With a Divided NATO’, the New York Times headlined on 29 May. The paper claimed that Bonn’s insistence on reducing the threat of SNFs to German territory raised fears in Washington, London and Paris of nothing less than the ‘denuclearisation’ of NATO’s central front. Such was the gulf, the newspaper noted, that no communiqué had been agreed in advance, which meant that NATO’s sixteen leaders would ‘have to thrash it out themselves’ at the summit. One NATO delegate confessed, ‘I honestly don’t know if a compromise is possible.’[104] (#litres_trial_promo)
The president, however, had something up his sleeve when he arrived in Brussels. He presented his allies with a radical arms-reduction proposal not on SNFs but on conventional forces in Europe. This had not been easy to hammer out in Washington but fear of an alliance crisis in Brussels enabled Bush to bang heads together. What the president dubbed his ‘conventional parity initiative’ of 275,000 troops on each side would mean the withdrawal of about 30,000 Americans from Western Europe and about 325,000 Soviet soldiers from Eastern Europe. This was to be agreed between the superpowers within six to twelve months. Bush’s initiative was intended to probe Gorbachev’s longer-term readiness to accept disproportionate cuts that would eliminate the Red Army superiority in Eastern Europe on which Soviet domination of their satellite states had always depended. But more immediately, according to the New York Times, it was meant to ‘bring about a dramatic shift in the summit agenda’, thereby ‘swamping the missile discussion’. And this indeed proved to be the case. After nine hours of intense debate the allies accepted Bush’s proposals on cuts to conventional forces in Europe and especially his accelerated timetable. In return, the United States committed itself to ‘enter into negotiations to achieve a partial reduction of American and Soviet land-based nuclear missile forces’ as soon as the implementation of a conventional-arms accord was ‘under way’. This deal kept the Genscherites happy because of the prospect of rapid SNF negotiations, while Thatcher and Mitterrand – representing the two European nuclear powers – were gratified that there had been no further erosion of the principles of NATO’s nuclear deterrence per se. And it also suited Bush: keen to lower the conventional-warfare threat in Europe, he had been adamant that on the issue of nukes there should be ‘no third zero’.[105] (#litres_trial_promo)
So the NATO summit that had seemed so precarious ended up as a resounding success. ‘An almost euphoric atmosphere’ surrounded the final press conference. Kohl declared ebulliently that he now perceived ‘a historic chance’ for ‘realistic and significant’ progress on arms control. He could not resist poking fun at his bête noire, Thatcher, who, he said, had come to Brussels taking a very hard line against any SNF negotiations and fiercely opposing concessions to the Germans. ‘Margaret Thatcher stood up for her interests, in her temperamental way,’ the chancellor remarked. ‘We have different temperaments. She is a woman and I’m not.’[106] (#litres_trial_promo)
The remarkably harmonious outcome of the Brussels meeting – ‘we were all winners’, proclaimed Kohl[107] (#litres_trial_promo) – was a big boost for NATO at forty. Indeed, he felt it was the ‘best kind of a birthday present’ the Alliance could have.[108] (#litres_trial_promo) But it was also a huge boon for Bush, who had been under attack at home for failing to give leadership to the Alliance and for surrendering the diplomatic initiative to Gorbachev. Now, however, with his compromise package he had turned the entire situation around. As Scowcroft reflected with satisfaction, after this ‘fantastic result’ the press ‘never returned to their theme of the spring – that we had no vision and no strategy’.[109] (#litres_trial_promo) Brussels, stated an American reporter, was ‘Bush’s hour’.[110] (#litres_trial_promo)
As soon as the NATO press conference was over, the president travelled on to a sunlit evening in Bonn, basking in the warm glow of his success.[111] (#litres_trial_promo) At a state dinner that night in a grand eighteenth-century restaurant, the president toasted another fortieth anniversary – that of the Federal Republic itself. ‘In 1989,’ he declared expansively, ‘we are nearer our goals of peace and European reconciliation than at any time since the founding of NATO and the Federal Republic.’ He added: ‘I don’t believe German–American relations have ever been better.’[112] (#litres_trial_promo)
The following morning, 31 May, the Bush–Kohl caravan sailed on down the Rhine to the picture-book city of Mainz, capital of the Rhineland-Palatinate, Kohl’s home state.[113] (#litres_trial_promo) ‘The United States and the Federal Republic have always been firm friends and allies,’ the president announced, ‘but today we share an added role: partners in leadership.’[114] (#litres_trial_promo)
This was a striking phrase, testimony to the maturation of the American–West German relationship over the previous forty years – made ever sharper by the downgrading at the summit of Thatcher and by implication of London’s ‘special relationship’. To speak about Bonn as Washington’s ‘partner in leadership’ definitely stuck in her gullet: as she sadly admitted, it ‘confirmed the way American thinking about Europe was going’.[115] (#litres_trial_promo)
Whereas Thatcher fixated on the partnership aspect of what Bush was saying, in his Mainz speech the president focused much more on what it meant to lead. ‘Leadership’, he declared, ‘has a constant companion: responsibility. And our responsibility is to look ahead and grasp the promise of the future … For forty years, the seeds of democracy in Eastern Europe lay dormant, buried under the frozen tundra of the Cold War … But the passion for freedom cannot be denied forever. The world has waited long enough. The time is right. Let Europe be whole and free … Let Berlin be next – let Berlin be next!’[116] (#litres_trial_promo)
Two years before, Bush’s predecessor Ronald Reagan had stood before the Brandenburg Gate and called on the Soviet leader, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’[117] (#litres_trial_promo) Now in June 1989 a new US president was throwing down the gauntlet once again, mounting a new propaganda offensive against the charismatic Soviet leader. ‘Let Berlin be next’ was in one way headline-grabbing rhetoric, but it revealed that the administration was already beginning to grapple with the issue of German unification. As Bush said in his Mainz speech, ‘the frontier of barbed wire and minefields between Hungary and Austria is being removed, foot by foot, mile by mile. Just as the barriers are coming down in Hungary, so must they fall throughout all of Eastern Europe.’ Nowhere was the East–West divide starker than in Berlin. ‘There this brutal wall cuts neighbour from neighbour, brother from brother. And that wall stands as a monument to the failure of communism. It must come down.’
Despite his emphasis on Germany, Bush’s vision remained much broader. The will for freedom and democracy, he insisted yet again, was a truly global phenomenon. ‘This one idea is sweeping across Eurasia. This one idea is why the communist world, from Budapest to Beijing, is in ferment.’[118] (#litres_trial_promo) By June 1989, Hungary was undoubtedly on the move but here change was occurring peacefully. On the other side of the world, however, the forces of democratic protest and communist oppression collided violently and with dramatic global consequences in China’s Forbidden City.
*
On 15 May, just before noon, Mikhail Gorbachev landed at Beijing’s airport to begin a historic four-day trip to China. Descending the steps of his blue-and-white Aeroflot jet, he was greeted by the Chinese president Yang Shangkun. The two men then walked past an honour guard of several hundred Chinese troops in olive-green uniforms and white gloves. A twenty-one-gun salute boomed in the background.
The long awaited Sino-Soviet summit showed that relations between the two countries were returning to something like ‘normal’ after three decades of ideological rifts, military confrontation and regional rivalries. The Soviet leader certainly viewed his visit as a ‘watershed’. In a written statement issued to reporters at the airport, he remarked: ‘We have come to China in the springtime … All over the world people associate this season with renewal and hope. This is consonant with our mood.’ Indeed, it was anticipated that Gorbachev’s visit could seal the reconciliation of the two largest communist nations at a time when both were struggling through profound economic and political changes. ‘We have a great deal to say to each other as communist parties, even in practical terms,’ observed Yevgeny Primakov, a leading Soviet expert on Asia, ahead of the meeting. ‘This normalisation comes at a time when we are both studying how socialist countries should approach capitalism. Before, we both thought that socialism could be spread only by revolution. Today,’ he added, ‘we both stress evolution.’ There were fears in Asia and America that this summit meeting might even presage a new Sino-Soviet axis, after years when the United States had been able to capitalise on the rift between Moscow and Beijing.[119] (#litres_trial_promo)
Gorbachev arrived in a city gripped by political upheaval. For over a month students from across China, but especially from Beijing, had been on the streets. Their frustrations against the authorities had been simmering for several years but the immediate trigger was the death of Hu Yaobang, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1982–7) – the man who in 1986 had dared to suggest that Deng was ‘old-fashioned’ and should retire. Instead Deng and the hardliners had forced out Hu in 1987, who was then lauded by the students as a champion of reform. In the weeks after Hu died on 15 April 1989, more than a million people turned out to protest in Beijing – denouncing growing social inequality, nepotism and corruption and demanding democracy as an all-purpose panacea. What started out as law-abiding protest quickly swelled into a radical movement. And the stakes rose even higher for both sides, after the party newspaper the People’s Daily, in an editorial on 26 April,characterised the demonstrations as nothing less than ‘turmoil’ and denounced the students as ‘rioters’ with a ‘well-planned plot’ to cause anarchy. They were accused of displaying unpatriotic behaviour, of ‘attacking’ and even ‘rejecting’ the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system.[120] (#litres_trial_promo)
On 13 May, two days before Gorbachev’s arrival in the capital, a thousand students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, bedding down on quilts and newspapers close to the monument honouring the nation’s heroes. The Soviet leader’s visit was a pivotal moment for the young Chinese protestors, for it offered an unprecedented opportunity to air their grievances while the eyes of the world were upon them. They carried banners in Russian, English and Chinese. One read ‘Welcome to a real reformer’; another ‘Democracy is our common dream’.[121] (#litres_trial_promo) Gorbachev – a household name from the media – represented to them everything the Chinese leaders were not: a democrat, a reformer and a changemaker. Their aim was to take their case straight to him – over the heads of the regime – while embarrassing their leaders into making concessions. The students delivered a letter with 6,000 signatures to the Soviet embassy asking to meet with Gorbachev. The response was cautious. The embassy announced that the general secretary would talk with members of the public but it gave no details about who and when.[122] (#litres_trial_promo)
New dawn for China?
The CCP leadership was caught in a cleft stick. For weeks the summit talks had been meticulously prepared: the Chinese government wanted everything to unfold without a hitch. Instead, the centre of their capital had been turned into a sea of demonstrators chanting to the world media ‘You have Gorbachev. And who do we have?’[123] (#litres_trial_promo) The massive student protests were therefore a major embarrassment, especially considering the presence of no less than 1,200 foreign journalists, there to cover the summit but now taking every opportunity to interview protestors and broadcast live pictures of the chaos into which Beijing had descended. And the government could do nothing to stop them, for fear that repression would be beamed around the world. It was, as Deng tersely admitted, a ‘mess’. He told insiders: ‘Tiananmen is the symbol of the People’s Republic of China. The Square has to be in order when Gorbachev comes. We have to maintain our international image.’[124] (#litres_trial_promo)
On Sunday 14 May, the day before the summit talks, the students made clear that they had no intention of complying with appeals to their patriotism by the Chinese authorities, who had called on them to clear the Square. On the contrary, some 10,000 held a vigil in the middle of Tiananmen; by daylight on Monday the crowd had swollen to an estimated 250,000. Top party officials spoke repeatedly with student leaders, promising to meet their demands for dialogue and warning of grave international embarrassment for China if they did not desist. All this was to no avail. In fact, the students’ obduracy forced a last-minute shift in Chinese protocol – changing the whole dynamic of the summit.[125] (#litres_trial_promo)
The grand red-carpet entrée for Gorbachev up the sweeping steps of the Great Hall of the People that faces Tiananmen Square had to be abandoned. Instead there was a hastily arranged welcome ceremony at Beijing’s old airport and an incognito drive through backstreets and alleyways to enter the National People’s Congress building by a side door. Only when safely inside would Gorbachev enjoy a lavish state banquet hosted by President Yang.[126] (#litres_trial_promo)
The situation was equally delicate for Gorbachev. The only appropriate response, it seemed, was to keep completely out of China’s internal politics and pretend that everything was running normally. But privately the Soviet delegation was shocked. Largely in the dark, they wondered whether China was falling apart. Maybe the country was in the midst of a wholesale ‘revolution’, perhaps on its political last legs? Gorbachev tried to act with appropriate ‘reserve and judiciousness’, as he put it later, but as soon as he saw the situation first-hand he felt they should leave for home as quickly as possible.[127] (#litres_trial_promo) Obliged to speak to the press once during his visit, he offered only vague answers. He dodged questions about the protests – admitting he had seen the demonstrators with their banners demanding Deng’s resignation but saying that he would not himself assume ‘the role of a judge’ or even ‘deliver assessments’ about what was going on.[128] (#litres_trial_promo) Of course, he said, he was personally for glasnost, perestroika and political dialogue but China was in a different situation and he was in no position to be ‘China’s Gorbachev’. Indeed, he had told his own staff on arriving that he was not keen to take the Chinese road, he did not want Red Square to look like Tiananmen Square.[129] (#litres_trial_promo)
Conversely, the Chinese leadership did not want Beijing to go the way of Budapest or Warsaw. The visit of the prime champion of communist reform provoked intense debate within the CCP. On 13 May Deng had made clear his dogmatic hard-line position to the politically reformist Zhao Ziyang. ‘We must not give an inch on the basic principle of upholding Communist Party rule and rejecting a Western multiparty system.’ Zhao was not convinced: ‘When we allow some democracy, things might look chaotic on the surface; but these little “troubles” are normal inside a democratic and legal framework. They prevent major upheavals and actually make for stability and peace in the long run.’[130] (#litres_trial_promo)
Prime Minister Li Peng took a position similar to Deng, with a preconceived and highly negative view of the man from the Kremlin and his reform agenda: ‘Gorbachev shouts a lot and does little,’ Li wrote in his diary. And by eroding the party monopoly on power he had ‘created an opposition to himself’, whereas the CCP had kept sole control and thereby ‘united the great majority of officials’. Li also blamed glasnost for triggering ethnic unrest inside the USSR, especially the Caucasus, and for stirring up the political upheavals in Eastern Europe. He warned that such recklessness might lead to the total break-up of the Soviet empire and spread this contagion to China itself. Deng and Li spoke for most of the inner circle, which was extremely wary of their Soviet visitor – especially given the inspirational effect he clearly had on his youthful Chinese fan club.[131] (#litres_trial_promo)
Like Bush three months earlier, on 15 and 16 May Gorbachev met with China’s senior figures. But unlike Bush’s experience, there were no warm recollections of past times together; no intimacy or small talk. In fact, even though Yang and Li had lived for a while in the USSR as students and spoke Russian quite well, there was no personal connection between Gorbachev and his Chinese interlocutors. But, as with Bush, it was the encounter with Deng that really mattered to Gorbachev.
‘Gorbachev 58, Deng 85’[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) read some of the banners in the streets, contrasting the youthfulness and dynamism of the Russian leader and the conservatism of his ‘elderly’ Chinese counterpart, who would be 85 in August. Gorbachev was keen to make a good impression on Deng: trying to be tactful and deferential – for once, inclined to listen rather than talk. To let the older man speak, he reasoned, ‘is valued in the East’. The Chinese were equally sensitive to style and symbolism. They wanted to avoid all bear hugs or smooching of the sort that communist leaders so often lavished on each other. Instead they were keen to see the ‘new’ Sino-Soviet relationship, symbolised by a respectful handshake. This would be appropriate to international norms and also underline the formal equality now being established between Beijing and Moscow.[132] (#litres_trial_promo)
A friendly grip? Deng with Mikhail and Raisa
Deng and Gorbachev met for two hours in the Great Hall of the People on 16 May. The first few minutes were televised live so they could announce to the world the official normalisation of their relations. The catalyst, Deng said, had been when Gorbachev assumed power in 1985 and began to reassess Soviet foreign policy, moving away from the Cold War with the West and conflicts with other countries. He particularly praised Gorbachev’s speech at Vladivostok in July 1986, when the Soviet leader had made a major overture to China. ‘Comrade Gorbachev, all the people of the world, and I myself, saw new content in the political thinking of the Soviet Union. I saw that there might be a turning point in your relations with the United States and it might be possible to find a way out of the confrontation and transform the situation into one of dialogue.’ Since then, he added, Gorbachev had gradually removed or reduced the three big obstacles: Afghanistan, the Sino-Soviet border disputes, and then the war in Cambodia. As a result they had been able to normalise both state and party relations between the USSR and PRC.[133] (#litres_trial_promo)
In public, therefore, all was sweetness and light. But once the TV cameras had left, Deng changed his tone. ‘I would like to say a few words about Marxism and Leninism. We have studied it for many years.’ Much of what had been said in the past thirty years had ‘turned out to be empty’, he observed. The world had moved on from the days of Marx, and Marxist doctrine must move as well. Gorbachev remarked that ‘Thirty years did not pass in vain … by contrast, we rose to a new level of comprehension of socialism’ and, he added, ‘now we study Lenin’s legacy more attentively’. But, Deng interjected, Leninism also had to move with the times, not least because ‘the situation in the world is constantly changing … he who cannot develop Marxism–Leninism taking into consideration the new conditions is not a real Communist’. Deng’s thrust seemed to be that ideology had to evolve in the light of changing national and international circumstances – ‘there is no ready-made model of any kind’ – but that a socialist ideological framework remained essential to avoid the chaos of pragmatism and mere experimentation.[134] (#litres_trial_promo)
Here was a coded but clear critique of Gorbachev’s approach to reform in the ‘construction of socialism’, but the Soviet leader – seeking to remain deferential – chose to ignore it, agreeing instead with his Chinese counterpart that they ‘must now draw a line under the past, turning one’s sights to the future’. Yes, said Deng, ‘but it would be incorrect if I did not say anything today about the past’. Each side, he added, had ‘the right to express their own point of view’ and he would start the ball rolling. ‘Fine,’ said Gorbachev, only to be on the receiving end of a long and rambling monologue by the aged Chinese leader about the damage and indignities inflicted on his country over the course of the twentieth century. Deng listed in turn the territorial depredations by Britain, Portugal, Japan, tsarist Russia and then the USSR under Stalin and Khrushchev – and especially, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet military threat along China’s own border. Though dismissing the ideological quarrels of the past, Deng conceded ‘We were also wrong.’ But he clearly laid overwhelming blame for their bilateral tensions at the Kremlin’s door: ‘the Soviet Union incorrectly perceived China’s place in the world … the essence of all problems was that we were in an unequal situation, that we were slighted and oppressed’.[135] (#litres_trial_promo)
Eventually Gorbachev got his chance for a few words. He said that he saw things differently but did accept ‘a certain culpability and responsibility on our part’ for the very recent past. All the rest – especially the territorial shifts of the early twentieth century – belonged already to history. ‘How many states have disappeared, and new ones have appeared? … History cannot be rewritten; it cannot be remade anew. If we took the road of restoring past borders on the basis of how things were in the past, which people lived in which territory, then, in essence, we’d have to redraw the entire world. That would lead to a worldwide scuffle.’ Gorbachev stressed his belief in geopolitical ‘realities’ – the ‘principle of the inviolability of borders gives stability to the world’ – and reminded Deng that his own generation had grown up ‘in the spirit of friendship with China’.
These mollifying words seemed to snap the old man out of his historical reverie. ‘This was just a narrative,’ Deng muttered. ‘Let us consider that the past is over with.’ ‘Good,’ replied Gorbachev. ‘Let’s put an end to this.’ After some final vague words about the ‘development’ of their relations, the meeting came to a conclusion. It was as if they had settled the past, but without any clear sense of the future.[136] (#litres_trial_promo)
This was indeed the case. When Gorbachev had tried to discuss Sino-Soviet trade and joint economic projects with Li Peng, he had made no progress. He could offer the USSR’s usual export staples – oil and gas – but the Chinese were not particularly interested. When asked for Soviet investment, Gorbachev was in no position to provide anything. And as for advanced technology, especially IT, Li made clear that China looked to the United States and also Japan. There were no other substantive talks.[137] (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, on his last day in Beijing Gorbachev was largely marooned in a guest house on the outskirts – unable, as originally scheduled, to reach the Forbidden City or attend the opera because of the protests. After a short visit to Shanghai, he returned home on 19 May with very mixed feelings about the whole trip: real satisfaction about the normalisation of relations – ‘a watershed event’ of ‘epoch-making significance’ – but also profound uncertainty about the future not only of Sino-Soviet relations but of the People’s Republic itself.[138] (#litres_trial_promo)
The moment Gorbachev had left Beijing, Deng turned his mind to sorting out the students. Their brazen refusal to leave Tiananmen voluntarily had humiliated the Paramount Leader but, while his Soviet guest was around, Deng’s hands had been tied. Now his anger boiled over. The Chinese capital had become virtually paralysed with over a million protestors sitting in the Square and marching down the boulevards. The students had been joined by workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, teachers, peasants – even recruits from Beijing’s police academy dressed in their uniforms.[139] (#litres_trial_promo) Order was crumbling; the regime itself seemed in danger.
Over the weekend of 20 May, Deng declared martial law in Beijing. The government brought in thousands of troops armed with machine guns and backed by tanks, tear gas and water cannons.[140] (#litres_trial_promo) It imposed tight media censorship and forced out Zhao, the liberal chief of the party, because of his conciliatory approach to the protestors. The hardliners were now in charge. But it would take another two weeks of heightened tension before the crisis was resolved. The mere presence on the streets of the People’s Liberation Army was not enough: the men had in any case been briefed not to cause bloodshed. The students, certainly, were not cowed and they used techniques of non-violence to keep the troops at bay. Even though their numbers had diminished by late May to perhaps 100,000, they continued to hold the Chinese communist leadership hostage, both politically and ideologically.[141] (#litres_trial_promo)
State power and human vulnerability
What the protestors stood for was summed up, at least for the global media, in the ‘Goddess of Democracy’. This ten-metre-high white pâpier-mâché and styrofoam statue resembling New York’s Statue of Liberty was erected on 29 May at the heart of the Square in front of the Imperial Palace. Press photographs showed it as if eyeing defiantly the great picture of Mao. Democracy – on the US model – had become the celebrated symbol of the demonstrators’ demands. The Chinese government issued an official statement ordering the statue to be taken down, calling it an ‘abomination’ and declaring ‘this is China, not America’.[142] (#litres_trial_promo)
Beside himself with frustration, Deng finally ordered the military to use force on those who, he said, were trying to subvert the nation. His justification was that China needed a peaceful and stable environment to continue along its reform path, to modernise and open up to the capitalist world. But reform, he insisted, did not mean doing away with four key principles: upholding socialism, maintaining the CCP’s leadership and party monopoly, supporting the ‘people’s democracy’, and adhering to Marxist–Leninist–Maoist philosophy. Pure ideology, enforced by autocratic party rule, was there to stay.[143] (#litres_trial_promo)
At dawn on Sunday 4 June, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers flooded Tiananmen Square and the surrounding streets, firing their sub-machine guns into crowds of men and women who refused to move out of the way. Scores of students and workers were killed and wounded. Several thousand on the edge of the mayhem left the Square peacefully, though still defiantly waving their university banners. Their encampment was then destroyed: armoured personnel carriers ran over the tents, ruthlessly driving over individuals who had chosen to stay put. When some of the protestors retaliated by toppling army vehicles and stoning the Great Hall of the People, the soldiers used tear gas and truncheons. Soon the city’s hospitals were inundated. ‘As doctors, we often see deaths,’ said one medic at the Tongren Hospital. ‘But we’ve never seen such a tragedy like this. Every room in the hospital is covered with blood.’[144] (#litres_trial_promo)
The precise death toll remains impossible to establish: estimates vary from 300 to 2,600. Chinese state news on 4 June exulted in the crushing of a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’ and highlighted the casualties among police and troops. The demonstrators were soon airbrushed out of China’s official history. But what really mattered was that the country’s brief and traumatic battle for democracy had been immortalised by the world’s media. In addition to the reports of the carnage and the civilian deaths, images emerged of the crackdown that became truly iconic – fetishised by reformers around the world as symbols of China’s lost 1989. The two most notable icons were the photo of a lone man apparently defying a line of tanks, whose fate remains tantalisingly unknown. He would become the classic emblem of global 1989 – the power of the people. And the Goddess of Democracy captured in an eye-catching way what the protestors had struggled for. On the morning of 4 June the statue was quickly reduced to shards and then washed out of the Square by the clean-up troops amid the debris of a failed revolution. But the world would not forget.[145] (#litres_trial_promo)
Tiananmen – The tanks take over
And so China reinvented communism – by force. In the process, as the tragedy was played out in real time on TV, the students became identified in the Cold War context with Western ideals of freedom, democracy and human rights. The Chinese government’s use of tanks against unarmed students also evoked memories of 1968, not just student protests around the world but the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Red Army – which had shaken European communism to its core. Deng was now widely seen as the villainous enemy of freedom and many asked whether Gorbachev would stay true to his UN speech, when he had renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine and championed ‘freedom of choice’. With unrest mounting in the Soviet bloc and the USSR itself, would Gorbachev go the way of Deng? Would the tanks now roll in Eastern Europe?
*
Five days later Moscow issued a limp statement of ‘regret’ over the bloodshed and expressed the ‘hope’ that common sense and continued reform would prevail in the PRC. Soviet government spokesman Gennady Gerasimov admitted that Soviet officials were surprised at the brutality with which the Chinese leaders put down the student demonstrators. ‘We hadn’t expected this.’[146] (#litres_trial_promo) Privately, Gorbachev told Kohl that he was ‘dismayed’ by developments in China, but did not elaborate further.[147] (#litres_trial_promo) For him the stand-off in Beijing corroborated his long-held view that Deng’s approach to reform was bound to create tensions and that political liberalisation was the only way to resolve such tensions without spilling blood. So the Soviet leader became ever more convinced that his strategy, aimed at avoiding violence and building a ‘mixed economy’ without the extremes of capitalist privatisation and social inequality, was the only sensible way forward. In short, for Gorbachev economic reform had to be complemented by political reform – whatever that would mean.[148] (#litres_trial_promo)
Others in the Soviet Union wanted Gorbachev to openly condemn the Chinese government. The radical politician Boris Yeltsin and the human-rights advocate Andrei Sakharov decried Deng’s actions as ‘a crime against the people’ and drew parallels between the Chinese crackdown and the Soviet military’s ‘repression’ of demonstrations in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April, only weeks before Gorbachev went to Beijing. (Interestingly, Deng had cited that incident to his own people as an example of good discipline.) But Gorbachev had no intention of emulating Yeltsin and Sakharov. He was not about to sacrifice the hard-won gains of his personal diplomacy for the sake of abstract principles.[149] (#litres_trial_promo) China was too important to the USSR to risk alienating Deng by what both sides would have agreed was ‘interference in internal affairs’.
Bush’s reaction to Tiananmen was similarly cautious. The Americans had not been surprised by the turn of events – James Lilley, the new US ambassador in Beijing, had been predicting a crackdown for weeks and the president himself had been careful not to make any encouraging noises to the demonstrators to avoid inflaming passions.[150] (#litres_trial_promo) He told reporters on 30 May: ‘I’m old enough to remember Hungary in 1956, and I would want to do nothing in terms of statement or exhortation that would encourage a repeat of that.’[151] (#litres_trial_promo)
In private the president had sent Deng a letter three days earlier appealing to him frankly as an old friend and warning against ‘violence, repression and bloodshed’, lest this damage Sino-American relations.[152] (#litres_trial_promo) Deng took no notice. On 4 June Bush tried to reach him by phone but Deng simply refused to take the call. It was a blatant snub: even a lao pengyou had no clout when it didn’t suit China.[153] (#litres_trial_promo)
Deng clearly believed he could risk the crackdown. He predicted that the West would soon forget, and in any case they knew that trade with China was too important to sever relations altogether. Indeed, Deng had been careful to reassure Washington about his deep concern for their mutual relations. The Chinese leader was not wrong in his assumptions. The signals from Washington were mixed. On the one hand, Bush ‘deplored’ Deng’s decision to use force against peaceful demonstrators[154] (#litres_trial_promo) and suspended military sales and high-level official contacts with China. He also offered humanitarian and medical assistance to anyone who had been injured in the Tiananmen tragedy. But, on the other hand, he had no intention of severing diplomatic relations or pressing for tough sanctions, from which only ordinary people would suffer. Given his personal bond with Deng and his faith in the magnetic attraction of capitalism, Bush sought to avoid any confrontation that would jeopardise a blossoming Sino-American relationship in the long run. China in Bush’s eyes had come such a long way. If he acted too harshly, he might feed the anti-reformist, hard-line elements in Beijing and set the clock back – something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But if he was seen as acting too softly, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe including the USSR might feel encouraged to use force against their political opponents. The problem was that his room for manoeuvre was severely limited – especially at home where Congress was calling for stricter sanctions and the human-rights lobby wanted to punish the ‘butchers of Tiananmen’ and denounced Bush as the ‘appeaser’ of Beijing.[155] (#litres_trial_promo)
Juggling these various pressures, and having publicly defended presidential pre-eminence in foreign policy against congressional encroachment, on 21 June Bush tried again to reach out to Deng. This time he sent a handwritten letter composed, he said, ‘with a heavy heart’. He appealed to their ‘genuine friendship’, stressed his respect for Deng personally, and even trumpeted his own ‘great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition’. He made it clear that he would not dictate or interfere but appealed to Deng not to ‘let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built over the past seventeen years’. Mindful of the 4 June snub, the president added, ‘I would of course welcome a personal reply to this letter. This matter is too important to be left to our bureaucracies.’[156] (#litres_trial_promo)
This time personal diplomacy worked. Bush got a reply within twenty-four hours – sufficiently positive that at the beginning of July Bush asked Scowcroft to smuggle himself into China for talks with Deng and Li. It was an epic adventure story reminiscent of Kissinger’s Marco Polo visit to Beijing in July 1971. They set off at 5 a.m. on 30 June 1989 from Andrews Air Force Base, travelling on a C-141 military cargo plane ‘in which had been installed what was euphemistically called a portable “comfort pallet”, a huge box containing bunks and place to sit’. The aircraft could be refuelled in the air, avoiding the need to land anywhere en route, and their official destination was Okinawa but that was amended on the way. All USAF markings had been removed and the crew started in military uniforms but changed to civilian clothes before arriving in Beijing. The mission was so secret that Chinese military air defence had not been informed. Fortunately, when they saw an unidentified aircraft entering Chinese airspace near Shanghai and asked whether they should shoot it down, the call went right through to President Yang Shangkun who told them to hold their fire. The American party landed safely at lunchtime on 1 July and spent the rest of the day recovering from their ordeal at the State Guest House.[157] (#litres_trial_promo)
Scowcroft’s conversation with Deng on 2 July in the Great Hall of the People set the parameters for future policy on both sides – so much so that it’s worth setting out their positions in detail.[158] (#litres_trial_promo) Deng started by saying that he had ‘chosen’ Bush as a special friend because, ever since they first met, he had found him ‘trustworthy’. Of course, the problems in Sino-US relations could not be ‘solved by two persons from the perspective of being friends’, the Chinese leader said. So Deng was pleased that Bush had sent Scowcroft ‘as his emissary’. It showed that Bush understood the complexities of the situation. He had taken ‘a wise and cool-headed action – an action well received by us’. And so, ‘it seems there is still hope to maintain our originally good relations’.[159] (#litres_trial_promo)
Nevertheless, in Deng’s view, the blunt truth was that ‘on a large scale the United States has impugned Chinese interests’ and ‘hurt Chinese dignity’. That for him was the ‘crux of the matter’. Some Americans who were keen for the PRC and its socialist system to be overthrown had helped stir up ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’. And because the US had tied the knot, to borrow from a Chinese proverb, Deng insisted ‘our hope is that in its future course of action the United States will seek to untie the knot’. In other words, it was up to Bush to remedy the situation.
His government, Deng added, was determined to put down ‘the counter-revolutionary leaders’ in line with ‘Chinese laws’. And he insisted that ‘China will by no means waver in its resolution’. Otherwise, he asked rhetorically, ‘how can the PRC continue to exist?’ Deng left Scowcroft in no doubt that any interference in China’s internal affairs would not be tolerated and he warned Congress and the US media not to add more fuel to the fire. Indeed, he expected Washington to find a ‘feasible way and method’ to settle their differences regarding the events of Tiananmen.[160] (#litres_trial_promo)
Scowcroft responded with the studied courtesy that always mattered in America’s relations with China. He spoke at length about the personal bond between Bush and China and his own depth of feeling for the country. He tried to underline the strong US investment in the steady ‘deepening’ of its relations with Beijing since 1972, from which both sides had benefited strategically and economically, as well as on a human level. He also stressed the significance of his visit. ‘Our presence here after a trip of thousands of kilometres, in confidence so as not to imply anything but an attempt to communicate, is symbolic of the importance President Bush places on this relationship and the efforts he is prepared to take to preserve it.’[161] (#litres_trial_promo)
Having echoed Deng’s emphasis on the importance of personal friendship, Scowcroft then inserted the irreducible American agenda. ‘It is into this bilateral climate of deepening cooperation and growing sympathy that the events of Tiananmen Square have imposed themselves.’ He explained that the president had to cope with his electorate’s emotional reaction. This was America’s ‘internal affair’ – touching on its people’s fundamental values which Bush in turn shared to a significant degree. In other words, the president stood by his commitment to ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that he had enunciated in his inaugural address. And, by thereby defending America’s stance on human rights, he could not be seen to visit Beijing in person because that would confer a legitimacy on Deng’s regime which the bloodshed in Tiananmen had removed. But, Scowcroft told Deng, Bush wanted to ‘manage events in a way which will assure a healthy relationship over time’. And he was ‘very sensitive to Chinese concerns’. Back-channel diplomacy was therefore the only way to ‘restore, preserve and strengthen’ the bilateral relationship.[162] (#litres_trial_promo)
Deng did not reply directly. Instead, he emphasised three maxims that drove China. First, ‘I think one must understand history,’ Deng said. China had fought a twenty-two-year war costing 20 million lives – a conflict waged by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party. Indeed, he told Scowcroft, ‘if one should add the three-year war to assist Korea against US aggression then it would be a twenty-five-year effort’. Second, he underlined the sanctity of China’s independence: a country that would not allow itself to be directed by another nation ‘no matter what kind of difficulties should crop up in our way’. China would follow its own course for development regardless of the ‘macro international climate’. As for the third fundamental: there existed ‘no other force’ except the Chinese Communist Party that could represent China. This had been proved over ‘several decades’.[163] (#litres_trial_promo)
Scowcroft had a similar discussion with Li. Reflecting later, he sensed a deep rift and a ‘clash of cultures’[164] (#litres_trial_promo) which could not at the moment be bridged, but the clandestine trip had served its main purpose: to maintain channels of communication and thus quietly preserve economic ties. Bush noted in his diary, ‘I kept the door open.’[165] (#litres_trial_promo)
The Kremlin and the White House therefore reacted cautiously to Tiananmen. But behind the scenes their thinking was now in flux. In different ways Gorbachev and Bush had focused on relations with China in the early months of 1989 – both making high-profile visits to Beijing – but there was little that could be done, at least for the foreseeable future, in view of the Chinese communist leaders’ hard-line response to revolution.[166] (#litres_trial_promo) In mid-1989 Gorbachev and Bush were both recalibrating their policies.
The Soviet leader, it must be said, was still inclined to look east. Discussing Tiananmen with the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in Moscow on 15 July 1989, Gorbachev brushed aside emotive talk about the death toll, remarking ‘politicians have to be careful in these matters. Especially when we are talking about a country like China. About a country with a population higher than 1 billion people. This is a whole civilisation!’ Looking for positives, he even felt that China’s estrangement amidst world outrage about the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ had a silver lining: Beijing now needed friends and this might give Moscow and New Delhi a real opportunity at a time when Deng had become really fed up with Bush’s procrastination. ‘The Americans want everything to go badly here, or even worse than that. So we need to put hope mainly in ourselves.’ And also, he mused, perhaps in other sympathetic countries undergoing the tribulations of modernisation and development. ‘Yesterday we spoke to the minister of science and technology of the PRC. We talked about cooperation. He is well disposed.’ Gorbachev reminded Gandhi about their previous talks about ‘the triangle’ – a new framework of trilateral cooperation between the Soviet Union, India and China. ‘Perhaps now is the exact moment when they are truly interested in ties with you and with us?’[167] (#litres_trial_promo)
Gorbachev’s musings were symptomatic of the uncertainties of the international scene in the confusing summer of 1989. Yet others in his entourage viewed Tiananmen in the light of more immediate challenges in Europe. Vladimir Lukin, the head of Gorbachev’s planning staff, warned that the events of 4 June showed that the PRC leadership was drifting ‘more and more obviously towards the group of socialist countries with traditional ideology’ – meaning East Germany, Cuba, Romania and North Korea – ‘and, at the same time, treats with fear and suspicion those countries which are reforming the administrative-bureaucratic system’ – in other words Poland and Hungary. This, said Lukin, ‘of course is an unpleasant fact but it would be incorrect not to take it into account in our contacts with the Chinese’. Rather than trying to build an overt Asian axis, he advocated a posture of ‘well-wishing reserve’ towards Beijing, devoid of any flamboyant gestures. Such a policy would allow the Soviet Union ‘to pass through the current difficult period without spoiling relations with official Beijing’. And it would have the additional advantage of securing ‘the respect of the most advanced sections of the Chinese people’ who, he predicted, would doubtless play a role during the ‘not so distant period after Deng’ and would support ‘our forward movement in the “Western direction” of our foreign-policy activity’. This was a striking admonition. Lukin not only warned that China had now aligned itself firmly with the rearguard not the vanguard of communist reinvention – though he clearly thought the Deng era was coming to an end – but he also explicitly saw Russia’s future as lying not in Asia but with Europe and the Western world.[168] (#litres_trial_promo)
Amid all the furore about Tiananmen, it is easy to forget that 4 June was not just a landmark moment for China. That was the day when Solidarity came to power in Poland. So democracy was also on the march in Eastern Europe. Quite literally, indeed, because it was just four weeks earlier that Hungary’s communist government had taken the fateful step of cutting open its barbed-wire border with Austria. That breach offered a loophole to the West, particularly for East Germans who had the right of citizenship in the Federal Republic. At a time when China was walling itself into a new hybrid model – communist-controlled embryonic capitalism – the Iron Curtain was coming apart in Europe. This was a challenge to the Cold War order as a whole – and one that only the two superpowers could address. After pussyfooting around Mikhail Gorbachev for half a year, George H. W. Bush had no choice but to engage.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_0513c62e-d10c-5557-b2be-07510bca1156)
Toppling Communism: Poland and Hungary (#ulink_0513c62e-d10c-5557-b2be-07510bca1156)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) This was the origin of Hungary’s so-called ‘goulash economy’ of the 1960s – officially termed the ‘New Economic Mechanism’.[26] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
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] (#litres_trial_promo)
Nagy’s reburial catalysed strong anti-Soviet, anti-communist nationalism at the grass roots – rather like the papal visit to Poland, but in this case through memory politics instead of religious fervour. Both of these political transformations were largely shaped by specific national experiences, and were also contained within national boundaries. Yet they occurred at much the same time and each fed on and into the other. What was happening in both Poland and Hungary represented extrication from dictatorship through the creation of new institutional structures for new regimes. In addition, there was also a wider diffusion of revolutionary ideas,[33] (#litres_trial_promo) even beyond Eastern Europe. Indeed it is telling that the conservative hardliners in Beijing likened this to a contagion emanating from Poland and Hungary.[34] (#litres_trial_promo) In due course the ‘disease’ of economic reform combined with political democratisation[35] (#litres_trial_promo) would spread as the year went on, infecting the bloc from Estonia on the Baltic coast to Bulgaria on the shores of the Black Sea.
But contagion affecting a plethora of communist states was not the only dynamic of 1989. In one of these countries, Hungary, reform had the power to act as a solvent for the whole Soviet bloc and indeed for Cold War Europe itself.
*
This became clear on 27 June 1989, in a graphic image that rapidly made its way around the globe: two men, smartly dressed in business suits but standing in open country, wielded bolt cutters to nip holes in a rusty barbed-wire fence. The duo – Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock had travelled specially to the Austria–Hungary border to send a deliberate signal. Side by side, cutting through the wire fence, they seemed to be conveying the good news that the division of post-war Europe was coming to an end.
