The Atlantic and Its Enemies

27. Restoration

As Goebbels, bombs raining down on his ministry, and the Russians liberating Auschwitz, had noted in his diaries, when he heard about the Yalta conference, the real battle between the Allies had not been about Poland; it had been about Germany. So it was, and forty years later the Yalta settlement was starting to unravel, beginning, for that matter, with Poland. However, the crucial decisions were taken in Moscow, as a clever Hungarian had predicted, back in 1956. The 27th Congress of the Party, held at the turn of February/March 1986, was the stage. At the time, no-one really noticed what was happening: the proceedings of the Congress amounted to the usual tidal wave of liquid concrete. The Party rewrote its statutes, modifying earlier remarks as to class war and imperialism. Even Xan Smiley, astutest of the foreign correspondents, and the Economist did not notice that something decisive had happened — a forgivable mistake (this writer has reason to hope), given the needle-in-haystack nature of truth in that system. But what was really meant was that Moscow was giving up the Berlin Wall. Within months, Solidarność was discussing a new Poland, and within a few more months the Berlin Wall had indeed gone, and so, thereafter, did everything else go, including, by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. There was a romantic theory that this had been achieved by ‘We, the People’, a theory that could only elicit a chuckle from the grave of Andropov. The people were Mussorgsky extras, in an operetta where Polish pretenders made trouble for Old Believers. The Politburo were stupefied by Poland: they would not send in troops, and knew that their Polish puppets were lost: what were you to do with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, marching on their knees, to a religious symbol? If the proletariat went on strike against the Communists, how were you to deal with it?

Martial law had been declared at the end of 1981, and had solved nothing: Poland still had the debts, and after a week or two the black market ran things as before. In effect it was the Pope (with the American embassy) that now ran affairs. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. If he had called for a revolution, it would have happened. He did not. The virtues of capitalism and democracy did not much interest him and in 1984 Jaruzelski himself said that the Church was an ally. There was a curious aspect, that many of the people in the Reagan administration were Catholic: Haig’s brother was a priest, and there was William Casey at the CIA. Oleg Bogomolov, for the Institute of Socialist Relations, had written a report in 1978 about what the Pope would do. It is worth noting that both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with Ukrainian involvement, disliked the Uniates as fake. John Paul went again in 1987 and three quarters of a million people attended the Mass at Gdańsk. There had been a referendum on economic reform, boycotted at the behest of Solidarność, and strikes had followed in the spring (1988). Lech Wałęsa was needed, and in January 1989 he appeared on television again. Mieczysław Rakowski took over as prime minister, and in February 1989 there was a round table over the price increases. The elections then occurred in June, and by now Gorbachev and the Pope were co-operating. Gorbachev informed Cardinal Agostino Casaroli in Moscow in the ineffable words: ‘The most important thing is the human being. The human being must be at the centre of international relations. That is the point of departure for our New Thinking.’ And he did release the Lithuanian Cardinal Vincentas Sladkevičius, after twenty-five years in prison. In return he had a present: the Virgin of Fatima had promised that Russia would be freed. In the summer of 1989 Poland acquired a non-Communist government, the members of which undertook to leave the Communists alone. Opinions greatly varied as to the wisdom of this, and Alain Besançon made himself unpopular, as he talked of another Convention of Targowice, or sell-out. But was there a serious alternative? Gorbachev, by now doing the rounds of ‘our common European home’, had to act over Poland, and if the Church and the Americans pushed the Poles towards a compromise element, so be it. But he would also have to get rid of ugly, tiresome little Honecker as well.

Poland was really about Germany, and another important People’s Democracy also supervened. Act two was set in Hungary. János Kádár, the general secretary, had promised some economic liberalization and had impressed Mitterrand. Hungary had always had a strange relationship with Austria, and Austria was now, in her way, a considerable success story. Why was Budapest, capital of what was in the end a rather more interesting civilization, such a lifeless ruin? Something of an effort was made to do something with Budapest, and at least the Váci utca and the old Gerbeaud café were very smudgy copies of the Herrengasse and the Sacher in Vienna, though if you went two or three tram stops down the Rákóczy út you were well and truly in the Communist bloc. Kádár was a prime opportunist, and the Russians needed him: he was very adept at making sure that he had no obvious successor. Besides, there was an enormous and very influential Hungarian diaspora, and after Ostpolitik its members came back and forth — latterly in the shape of George Soros. Hungary built up the largest per capita dollar debt in the world, $2bn, but the industrial showcases were not a success. In the recession of the early 1980s exports to the West ran down, and half of the earnings were needed just to pay the debt interest. Wages were blocked, there was notable inflation, and purchasing power fell by 15 per cent. Hungary had a degree of liberalization, Kádár announcing that who was not against was for, and there were opposition movements, with openings in the press. By 1985 there were public meetings, and in 1987 when Kádár was already 75 there was something of a turning point: the state enterprises were allowed to charge their own prices, but on the other side personal taxes were introduced. Imre Pozsgay circulated a document by the main economists, saying that the regime had led the country to near disaster, and in March 1988 — the anniversary of the revolution in 1848 — thousands of demonstrators gathered in Budapest. Viktor Orbán started to make his reputation as orator (and eventual prime minister). At the next Party conference, Kádár himself was voted out, and at another anniversary, the execution of Imre Nagy in 1958, the end of the Party itself was spelled out. Nagy had said that he feared being rehabilitated by his own executioners and that is what happened: the Communists shed their name and carried on as social democrats, or even as liberals.

Soviet leaders all along had tried to split Germany from the Atlantic alliance. In the later 1970s Brezhnev visited Bonn. There were German neutralists, and it even became chic in West Germany to talk as if all differences with the USSR could somehow be smoothed over. But the central problem remained, that the State which called itself the ‘German Democratic Republic’ was an embarrassment. It remained a place where the inhabitants had to be contained by a wall, and a very ugly one at that, complete with minefields and yapping hounds on dog-runs, in case they all decided to move out, as they had done before 1961, when the Wall was built. Erich Honecker was saying that the Wall would last for fifty years, and there was another very odd aspect to it, that many Germans agreed. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger wrote an essay saying the Wall would be an historical curiosity, and there were many West Germans with egg on their faces when it came down.

The East German state had already been reduced to a formality, kept going by the West. The Lutheran Church managed the sale of prisoners — 2,300 in 1983 and 1984, and emigration was anyway going ahead: a worker cost DM50,000 and a graduate DM200,000. From 1965 to 1988 30,000 were thus bought out, for DM2bn. Thirty thousand left legally every year while about 40,000 managed to escape (1961-88) and ten-day family visits went west (1.3 million in 1987). In 1981 East Germany owed $13bn and that took 43 per cent of export earnings; the Soviets did give loans but also cut back on cheap oil (hence the stink of lignite in Erfurt). In July 1983 it was Franz Josef Strauss (ambitious to be foreign minister) who negotiated with East Berlin — West German banks lending an interest-free billion Marks and another billion in 1984. The East Germans had reduced their trade with the West generally but it rose with West Germany. There were no customs barriers, and Strauss extracted two secret notes from Honecker as to the relaxation of border controls so as to prevent the strip-searching of children. Richard von Weizsäcker, as mayor of West Berlin, used to cross the border to discuss the S-Bahn and matters of pollution as no predecessor had done. Schmidt visited Honecker in 1981 and Honecker wanted to return but there were problems with Moscow and the Czechs and Poles, and besides Moscow had said that there would be no more such rapprochement if the Euro-missiles went ahead. Honecker therefore had to say in 1984 that he would not go, although in 1987 he indeed did. There he found a West Germany that gave him a welcome.

The SPD to Schmidt’s great disapproval now flirted with him, and in 1985 Oskar Lafontaine, minister-president of the Saarland, talked of accepting a separate nationality; in 1986 he even proposed a nuclear-free zone, though there had been the absurd ceremony for twenty-five years of the Wall, including a preposterous DDR stamp of a young girl giving flowers to soldiers shooting refugees. There was even a ridiculous ‘Values Commission’ of the SPD and the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, and when the end came the Lutheran Churches were forbidden to ring their bells. It remains extraordinary that Bonn did not see the end coming: it was only in the spring of 1989 that Chancellor Kohl told the French he could see great problems coming for the East German state. In 1988 9,000 East Germans had got out through a country of the bloc where holidays were allowed — mainly Poland. In 1989, in the summer, tens of thousands moved out via Hungary and Austria. This was voting with feet, and Moscow did nothing to prevent it. The heart of the whole business was Germany. Russia and Germany had had the key relationship, and by 1988 the Gorbachev team were in creative mode. How could they get rid of Honecker and his colleagues? The answer lay in Hungary. The prime minister, Miklós Németh, had been promised DM500m if the border were opened (April, in Bonn). In June 1989 Gorbachev came to Bonn on an official visit. He told Kohl that whole areas of the USSR might need immediate help. Kohl consulted no-one and said the first despatches would happen at once. The East German parliament had approved of Tiananmen Square and on 13 June Gorbachev said that it would not happen in Red Square, and the communiqué of 13 June in Bonn spoke of ‘self-determination’. Much was made of an East German resistance that was now mostly stage-managed. The Protestants were restive and 120 young protestants who sat in before a church, protesting against local elections with their 98.5 per cent yes vote, were arrested, but then the church went to court over the electoral fraud and the prisoners were released (May). Even the SPD ‘Values Commission’ protested in March against long prison sentences for the Justice and Peace Work Circle. In July at the Kirchentag, or Church congress, there were clashes and from then on at the Nikolai-Kirche growing numbers appeared every Monday protesting at not being allowed to go west: curious that Saxony, the heart of the wretched state, was also its end. Honecker was quite remote and cushioned by Stasi reports, but on 10 September the Hungarians opened the border with Austria.

Hungary’s foreign minister, Gyula Horn, himself a 1956 represser, opened the border for the thousands milling around Sopron and had sent his deputy, László Kovács, to ask the Russians, who made no objection; anyway the wire and mines had gone. Twelve thousand transports of East Germans went off in three days and some with little Trabants, while 7,000 in the Warsaw and Prague embassies left by trains through East Germany; another 10,000 invaded the Lobkowitz gardens in Prague. Three months of high drama followed. Communists dropped out of the Polish government and Wałęsa took over. On 7 October the Hungarian Party changed its name to ‘socialist’ and on 23 October, the anniversary of the Revolution, the Communists’ own parliament proclaimed the restoration of the republic plus old flags. There was an equivalent in Berlin, as various efforts were made to vary the SED formula; there was even a last appearance of the Menshevik USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) element, as Neues Forum was allowed at last in October, with a well-meaning earnest painter, Bärbel Bohley, to make critical comments about consumer goods and the refugees. The Leipzig church became too small, as the 5,000 marchers of 25 September became 10,000 a week later: even the factory militia started to be used with the police. Honecker did not mention it at all, but on 6-7 October Gorbachev visited for the fortieth anniversary — ritual kissing at the airport, Politburo servility and a soggy little joke from Honecker. The Russians were openly in ridicule mode, and Gerasimov remarked, ‘If you are late it’s a life sentence.’ Next day at a Politburo meeting Honecker went on about the success of the East German microchip and later denounced the ‘large-scale manoeuvre’ against him; indeed, Valentin Falin, the reigning German expert, seems to have encouraged Hans Modrow, the Dresden secretary, and Markus Wolf, the espionage chief, to get rid of this tiresome little know-all. They no doubt encouraged the demonstrators for Gorbachev on 9 October in Leipzig, 120,000 of them on the 16th. Apparently ammunition was distributed, but half a dozen people supervened, including Kurt Masur of the Gewandhaus. On the 18th Honecker resigned, with others, for ‘health reasons’: Soviet generals were privately saying that if the Wall went they would not intervene, and Shevardnadze had said as much to James Baker on 25 September. The extraordinary aspect of it all was the slowness among West Germans, and some of them were downright silly, right up to the last moment. The Left had been trapped: even Bahr in November 1988 was saying that talk of unification was ‘environmental pollution’, though he later tried to take credit for it. Some of the CDU put ‘Europe’ before unification and Strauss himself was making money out of the Moscow trade. Peter Glotz, an otherwise intelligent man who saw through the Yugoslav problem, rejected use of the word ‘unification’ as late as 21 October 1989. Norbert Gansel saved the Party’s honour when he recommended the expression Wandel durch Abstand as the hundreds of thousands of East Germans fled. Joschka Fischer for the Greens said, ‘We should strike the reunification commandment from the constitution’, in 1989 of all years, and Otto Schily had said the same in 1984. Both men went on to high government posts. Certainly no-one seems to have given any thought to how West and East Germany could be properly unified, and the subsequent story was unhappy: very high unemployment and empty cities.

Egon Krenz at fifty-two, representing ‘Youth’, took over. He had noisily approved of Tiananmen Square and had been head of Internal Security. The satirist Wolf Biermann called him a ‘standing invitation to flee the republic’. This figure now talked democracy on television, there was an amnesty for Republic-flight on 27 October and the clergymen managed the demonstrations that went on with 250,000 shouting, ‘Wir wollen raus.’ Krenz went to see Gorbachev and sacked five of the Politburo members. The Czechs then released their own East Germans (10,000) and now even in the Alexander-Platz on 4 November hundreds of thousands took to the streets shouting, ‘Wir sind das Volk.’ One and a half million had applied to leave permanently and 120,000 had already left, only a quarter legally. On 6 November the government said anyone might go for a month, and then resigned. Television now broadcast everything and Modrow was invited to take over. Cars from the West were no longer searched. There was a fear that the Brandenburg Gate would be stormed, and on 9 November Günter Schabowski, an East Berlin politician and member of the SED Politburo, made a muddled utterance as to exit visas, while a rumour went round that the Bornholmerstrasse crossing would be opened. The streets filled up and Vopo — Volkspolizei, or People’s Police — water cannon were used against people climbing the Brandenburger Tor, but other people attacked the Wall with picks, and on 10 November the Gedächtniskirche bells rang out as crowds mingled in the Kurfürstendamm; a Rostropovitch concert was held for the Stalin victims at the Gate itself. The East Germans gave out 7 million exit visas, and almost half of the population left. The absurd French Communist Georges Marchais sent congratulations to Krenz, although he was not to last too long.

On 11 November Kohl telephoned Gorbachev to reassure him and there was a to-do about unification — Mitterrand visited Bonn and promised support and then did what he could to delay it, attempting to use Margaret Thatcher, who was somewhat wrong-footed. There were maybe illusions as to the survival of East Germany as a sort of Austria, and for two weeks after 9 November Moscow seems to have supposed that East Germany would keep going under the reform Communists. This was quite wrong, and the German events inspired imitation. In astutely managed parties there was anticipation. Czechoslovakia was slow off the mark, but demonstrations started on 17 November and on 24 November Miloš Jakeš, the General Secretary, resigned; a new Party hierarchy came in: the demonstrations carried on, and on 10 December old Gustáv Husák went, to be replaced by museum pieces of 1968.

George Bush and Gorbachev were to talk. This was a secret affair at the outset, apparently suggested by General Jaruzelski, the previous July. Shevardnadze and Baker had talked in Paris about Cambodia and much else and Aleksandr Bessmertnykh with his outstanding English managed things: Bush and Gorbachev met on 2-3 December on tossing seas off Malta, an odd echo of the original Yalta. It was the seventeenth ‘summit’ and a list was ticked without teams of experts: there was understanding about German unification and by this stage the Soviet economy had been unravelling so far that Gorbachev was somewhat desperate for German credits and membership of the international economic institutions. By June 1990 he even told Congress as much, unaware that he was being recorded. In July Kohl came to Stavropol to discuss Soviet army withdrawal and Gorbachev agreed that East Germany could be in NATO: the German payment in the end amounted to DM60bn. However, it seems all to have gone back west, to Swiss accounts held by people who understood what was happening. The crisis now affected the Soviet Union itself. Just as the 28th Congress got going Ryzhkov ineptly announced price rises and in summer 1990 its component peoples (or their local bosses) began to break away.

There was a strong element of mise-en-scène in what had happened: the revolutions, though presented as such, were staged by the KGB. The general idea was to replace the old guard with ‘reform Communists’ such as Krenz who would be acceptable in the West. On 17 November a provocation was staged by the Czechoslovak secret police, at the order of a KGB general, Viktor Gruchko: a student demonstration was set up in Prague, and was fired on, complete with a student victim (who was filmed, walking away, once his ‘death’ had been recorded), and, this time round, back came Alexandr Dubček, flanked by Václav Havel, quite willing to co-operate with Gorbachev over German unification. Romania’s was the classic case. Ceauşescu was a true grotesque, and besides had on occasion challenged Moscow. He had held all possible jobs, and moved in relatives as he vacated them. A press law of 1974 laid down prison sentences for the diffusion of unauthorized information, and illegal crossing of the border attracted a sentence of three years; even the typeface of typewriters had to be registered with the Security Police, and informers were everywhere. The absurdities of the regime hardly had bounds: for instance, in 1967 contraception was made a crime and since abortions then grew to outnumber live births, that too became a crime, punishable with ten years’ imprisonment (1984). Ceauşescu had been very anxious to outdo Tito, and indeed he flourished because the West cultivated him. He was three times in Washington, and was so impressed by the fireside chats in the Oval Office that he had his own fireplace installed and kept lit even at the height of summer. His wife had aspirations as a natural scientist, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by London University. As she was being led out to execution, her last words were, ‘How can you do this to an honorary doctor? ’ Ceauşescu described himself as the ‘Danube of Thought’, and his stock-in-trade was a stupid nationalism, making much of the Latin connection (because of which the country’s name was changed from the Greek ‘Rumania’ into a ‘Romania’ which had been used to describe the Crusader and Latin state in Constantinople). But the 1980s went badly. Reagan did not have Nixon’s tenderness for Ceauşescu: the minute a reformist regime appeared in Moscow, he had lost his utility. The IMF did not renew its loans, but he went ahead with manic projects — tearing down old Bucharest, putting up a vast palace, and agro-villages which were meant to deprive peasants of any individuality. There was a Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and culturally it had a bad time, though the Hungarian towns were generally better-off and cleaner. In much of the country the people lived at a very low level, with revolting food and energy shortages.

A stage revolution was organized. Ion Iliescu was Moscow’s man and Ceauşescu had offended the Russians with his demands for abrogation of the treaty of 1940, which had allowed Stalin to annex the largely Romanian Bessarabia. Another stalwart was Silviu Brucan, a former ambassador in Washington; on occasion he wrote anonymously in the Western press; he was also visited every week by the correspondent of Pravda. In February 1989 Brucan, with five other senior figures, wrote an open letter to Ceauşescu, accusing him of ‘discrediting socialism, isolating Romania and failing to respect the Helsinki agreements’; when at the United Nations Romania was attacked by the French prime minister Michel Rocard, and the Human Rights Commission proposed an official visitation, the Soviet Union did not use its veto. Meanwhile there had been another piece of de — cisive action in Budapest. The chief foreign correspondent of Hungarian television, Aladár Chrudinák, was a brave and resourceful man who had managed to film the Cambodian horrors and reveal these in the West. Now he went to Transylvania, interviewed a young clergy-man, László Tőkés, and extracted from him a line to the effect that the wall of silence and lies had to be broken. Ceauşescu’s machine then went into action. He used Tőkés’s superior, the Bishop of Nagyvárad (it was a peculiarity of Hungarian Calvinism that it had bishops), to have him transferred from Timişoara in the Banat to a remote village in the mountainous north. Tőkés and his pregnant wife were then defended by parishioners, and the local Romanian population joined in (16 December). On the 17th the police used truncheons, even against the women and children who had been put at the head of the protesting demonstration, and Ceauşescu, on the verge of leaving for Teheran, complained at the ‘softness’ of the police. Troops opened fire, or so it was claimed, and rumours spread, partly through Budapest television, that thousands had been killed (Yugoslav television claimed 12,000). Ceauşescu broke off his visit to Iran, and decided to stage a mass meeting in his own support: thousands of people were brought in to demonstrate outside the Central Committee building, with orders to condemn the supposed Hungarian separatists — a device that in the past would have worked. However, this time round, it did not. A group of young people started shouting, ‘We are the people’, and there were catcalls. Bafflement spread over Ceauşescu’s face and his wife — the microphones had not been switched off — said, ‘Promise them something.’ He then promised a wage rise, but the offer was swamped, and, hurriedly, he made off, in a helicopter from the roof. On 22 December hundreds of thousands of people collected, and there was a general strike in Timişoara. Elsewhere, there were isolated outbreaks as crowds attacked Security Police buildings in Sibiu and Braşov, both in Transylvania, but the damage was very limited: much of the alleged fighting was staged, bullets deliberately fired in the air. This looked like revolution, but it was carefully managed, and Iliescu, wrapping himself in religion and nationalism, took over. Ceauşescu was subsequently tracked down, but of course he knew what had happened: ‘my fate was decided at Malta’, when Bush and Gorbachev had met; ‘everything that has happened in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria has been organized by the Soviet Union with the help of the Americans.’ He was shot, after a masquerade of a trial, in which the chief judge himself committed suicide. Iliescu, who had managed very cleverly to avoid contamination, took over, with a government of former Communists; soon he too was using ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ to put down the dissidents. This ‘revolution’ had been a montage if ever there was one, down to faked massacres: but it was soon followed by the greatest montage of them all, the coup of August 1991 in Moscow.

The ‘dissent’ that had the greatest explosive potential was indeed national. It was one and perhaps even the main factor in the very creation of the USSR that Russia consisted of several nations, some tiny, some large, some Slav, some Turkic. If you included the Ukraine among them, then half the population was non-Russian. The early Communists had found allies among these peoples, one remark being to the effect that the Revolution had been made by ‘Latvian rifles, Jewish brains and Russian fools’. Moslems in the Caucasus and Central Asia, like the Tatars in Russia proper, had made common cause with Lenin and at one level were rewarded, in that early schooling and basic newspapers were made available in native languages. However, in Stalin’s time Russification became the rule, and with let-ups from time to time so it remained. Because the regime operated strict censorship, the nationalist discontent hardly showed; when it did, there were vast camp-sentences for the people involved. In the 1950s semi-thaw, here and there, discontent emerged. Stalin had deported whole peoples, of whom a third would die during or just after the transport to some Central Asian waste, and the regime could also divide and rule, setting peoples against each other by the award of some territory to a different republic. This was done when the Crimea was handed to the Ukraine by Khrushchev, or, earlier, when Nagorny Karabakh, widely Armenian, was assigned to Azerbaidjan, in the capital of which, Baku, there was also a substantial Armenian population. Russians flooded into the Baltic states, though less so to Lithuania, for whatever reason. What was so very strange was that the Russians themselves were poorer than most of the others, imperial people though they might be, and the contrast with the satellites (except for Romania) was even more striking. Estonians ate 87 kilos of meat per head per annum and Russians 66 kilos; Estonians had three times as many motor cars; Baltic consumer goods were of higher quality as well; Azerbaidjan ate better because private plots were larger and less threatened. Russians muttered that they were parting with cheap energy to make these things possible, and also grumbled at the low levels of culture in Central Asia, which swallowed investment and made babies. However, as regards nationalities, tectonic plates were shifting.

Something of a Russian cultural revival got under way, with, in 1965, a society for the preservation of old buildings (something vastly needed) with 15 million members. A cult of Andrey Rublev developed; Suzdal was restored as a ‘museum city’ and the Golden Ring towns, little Moscows, complete with jewel-like Kremlins of their own, such as Uglich or Rostov, followed. Historians who wished to avoid overt politics could work on medieval themes, and there were writers who lamented what was happening to the language and to nature itself (particularly Valentin Rasputin, but also a Kirghiz, Cingiz Aitmatov, who, later on, was promoted as an instance of multi-nationalism). There was always at least potentially an anti-semitic element in this, given that Jews were crudely accused of hating old Russia. Religion was, again, potentially involved in this, and the regime kept a close eye upon it, not a single bishop being appointed without Central Committee say-so. Orthodox clergymen sent to the West, for the World Council of Churches, were straightforwardly agents, spouting Moscow’s lines on peace. A council of religious affairs and KGB oversight meant infiltration and control, though in Central Asia (and especially in Chechnya) resistance was stoutly managed, the more so as Islam was a way of life and not just a cult. Khrushchev, in pursuit of modernization and the creation of ‘new Soviet man’, persecuted religion, and since it could buttress nationalism closed churches. In 1981 another atheist campaign brought about the demolition of 300 of them, mostly in the Ukraine, while the devout might also lose their jobs, and monks were sometimes sadistically persecuted. Khrushchev had also been quite harsh as regards lesser nationalities, and little Siberian peoples could almost be wiped out with drink. Under Brezhnev, there was some lightening, and ethnographic institutes studied the lesser nationalities quite thoroughly. Brezhnev himself spoke, at the 23rd Congress in 1966, of the need for ‘solicitude’ as regards ‘peculiarities’; he also claimed that ‘the national question is now resolved completely and irrevocably’; Andropov remarked that Russian ‘has entered quite naturally into the lives of millions of people of all nationalities’. Brezhnev’s policy had been to appoint loyal ‘natives’, which led to some odd outcomes.

There was even a weird descant on the old French line, applicable in a surprisingly large number of countries, that ‘the south governs and the north works’: Ukrainians made up over 80 per cent of the Politburo in 1979. Under Petro Shelest and then Vladimir Shcherbitsky, a Ukrainian but also a Russifier, Kiev went its peculiar way as the Moscow centre came to rely on local ‘barons’ who could promote their own nationality, though in the form almost of a freemasonry. In this way, Haydar Aliev in Azerbaidjan or Leonid Kravchuk in the Ukraine were able to emerge as national leaders when the USSR itself disintegrated; in Central Asia the transition was even smoother. There, a system not far from apartheid developed, as Islam was a way of life almost independent of institutions, and there was almost no way of controlling, say, circumcision (although a fatwa pronounced it unhealthy in 1962). The four Sufi tarikat flourished surreptitiously, and Murids avoided contact with non-Moslems; after 1970 the proportion of the European population declined, and Moslems rose from one eighth to one fifth of the whole. Only in Kazakhstan did the Russian element rise, in proportion. To placate the locals, the great Uzbek monuments at Tashkent and Samarkand were restored, partly as a gambit in foreign policy, given Moscow’s closeness to the Arabs. But mosques were also closed down, and only twenty men were allowed to go on the Mecca pilgrimage every year. This was not reflected in Moscow, where there were few non-Slavs, but, short of Stalinist methods, there was no way to run the localities except through these locals, even if Andropov tried to break the system in the Caucasus by having ‘workers’ representatives’ somehow pushed in.

In the early 1970s, while accepting the Germans’ Ostpolitik, Andropov had told the Politburo what, in effect, the strategy was. The Soviet Union was falling behind the United States, and in areas that mattered, as distinct from kitchen equipment. He even hinted that, one day, the Soviet Union might just abandon central and eastern Europe, as a liability. Get rid of the Berlin Wall, cultivate good and profitable relations with Germany, fall back within the Soviet borders, and use the respite to recoup: it was not bad, as Leninist strategy, and in effect the various coups of 1989 were in some degree provoked or stage-managed, though none quite as obviously so as that in Romania. So far so good: Gorbachev was hero of the hour in the West, which, Germans in the lead, did indeed offer a great deal of money. However, Andropov’s strategy went wrong: he had clearly utterly underestimated the threat that would come, within those borders, from separatist nationalism, and officials had always claimed that Communism had solved the problem. But in 1990 this began to spread — in the event, overnight destroying the entire Soviet Union.

The process was devious, but the main lines were clear enough. Already in the later 1970s there had been a great many detailed studies as to how reform should be conducted, and at the 27th Congress, early in 1986, these had been implemented. After ‘acceleration’ there was to be ‘reconstruction’, the famous perestroyka. Great slabs of prose were then written about this, but the Party shrank back from any sort of private property, and the most that emerged was permission for a few small co-operatives. Later on, there was talk of ‘joint ventures’ with the West, a scheme by which the West supplied capital and knowledge, and the Soviet side the land. For the moment very few of these emerged, and they did not last for long, as the Western investors soon found themselves losing money through this or that administrative trick, what the French call chicane. Then there was the even more famous glasnost, ‘openness’ or perhaps just ‘criticism’: the intellectuals, the periodicals, the press were now free to discuss earlier taboo subjects. Ridiculous pieces of censorship were set aside, as for instance with the great writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and the historians were supposed to become less dishonest. This, welcomed universally, was not quite what it seemed: Bulgakov had been quite widely read in pirated editions, and no-one really needed to be told about the crimes of Stalin all over again. It can even be said that when, later on, some archives were opened, there were remarkably few ‘revelations’, or at any rate there was very little that came as a surprise. Still, what there was, in a Soviet context, was remarkable enough, and in Germany there was ‘Gorbymania’. By 1989, under pressure to show democratic credentials, Gorbachev did allow a Congress of People’s Deputies, in which roughly a fifth of the members had been freely elected. In that context, Russian nationalism now emerged in great strength, as the figure of Boris Yeltsin took the lead.

Yeltsin was an odd hero, yet another of those sinister clowns whom Russian history throws up. His background was pure Party, and he was mayor of Moscow from 1985 to 1987; there he criticized Party privileges, and attacked Gorbachev himself. He was then humiliated and sacked. However, he had his friends, and they were now advancing the cause of Russian nationalism: Russians were poor, and blamed the ungrateful empire for this; get rid of it, and keep the fabulous material resources of Siberia. Yeltsin was elected to Gorbachev’s Congress in 1989, and now set about conquering the power structures of Russia, as distinct from the Soviet Union: he became in effect president of a ‘sovereign’ Russia in 1990 (though formally only in 1991). Russians were supposed to obey him, and not Gorbachev; there were clashes. However, quite obviously, he knew how to manage powerful Russians, such as Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, and these powerful Russians were responding to the evidence of collapse. By 1990 the economy was running down, as there was an explosive increase in paper money, translated into a black market that occupied more and more of output. Worse, the various regions had developed their own networks, independently of Moscow, and these were now pushing ‘sovereignty’ — the first, Estonia in September 1988, the pebble announcing the avalanche. Panic-buying emptied the shops; by spring 1991 there were demonstrations of 150,000 people in Moscow, and Yeltsin took the lead. By this time the Party’s sharper men (there were not many women) were preoccupied with their own survival, and took up shadowy contacts with Western banks: thousands of millions went abroad, and the gold reserve disappeared (when the whole system fell apart in August 1991, the two men most obviously in the know as to this, Nikolay Kruchina (the treasurer) and Georgy Pavlov (the finance minister), committed suicide in circumstances that, for Kruchina, might suggest murder).

As nations declared ‘sovereigny’ — i.e. would not obey Soviet laws — and as mass demonstrations caught the attention of the Western media, Gorbachev responded initially by repression. Of course, once nationalism was released in this system, it expressed the frustration and rage that Communism produced; it was doing precisely the same in Yugoslavia, itself a little version of the USSR, complete with its Western subsidies. Troops were used in Lithuania, in January 1991, as had happened in Baku, in the Caucasus; but this time round, they were answered by mass demonstrations in Moscow itself, let alone in Baku. It was Yeltsin who now held the cards, and Gorbachev attempted to sort out a new constitution for the various peoples of the USSR; but this did not solve anything, the more so as there were now quite serious strikes, even in Byelorussia. In August came a mysterious affair: the putsch. Men whom Gorbachev had recently appointed, including the head of the KGB, appeared on 18 August, with tanks, on the streets, while Gorbachev was ostensibly on holiday on the Black Sea. They would take power, and to begin with the world took them seriously. However, this was almost a farce. One of the plotters, at a press conference, had obviously been calming his nerves with drink; fingers rapped nervously on the table. The tanks, on their way to Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Russian parliament, stopped at traffic lights, where old women with shopping bags banged on their sides, shouting at the drivers. Yeltsin was not even tracked to his country house; Sobchak in Leningrad was not touched, and rallied that city at once; the Yekaterinburg KGB came out for Yeltsin. In the event, the putsch disintegrated within three days, and the plotters flew to see Gorbachev, asking what to do. It had all been a clumsy manoeuvre, to make out that Gorbachev must be supported against ‘dark forces’. The whole affair ended within a week, allowing Yeltsin to appear as saviour of his country, as he stood on a tank and denounced the plotters; but the probability is that he had tricked them into thinking he would support them. At the end, Russia became independent, and the Communist Party was banned. But it left a country in many ways ruined, and bright men and women all over now wondered how they could turn it into a normal European country. Quite naïvely, to begin with, they looked at the Western model.