hi s to ry h i s t or y

They wanted to be free A new map

Constantine Pleshakov, a distinguished his-
torian of the Cold War, focuses his informa-
tive account mostly on international factors:
Soviet–US relations and the role of John Paul
II. The anti-Communist commitment of the
Austria was the final blow to Soviet-style
Communism in the region, a strategy that
Gorbachev came to tolerate, if not directly to
endorse. It is a provocative hypothesis, but not
wholly persuasive: there was a democratic
tion and in which critical intellectuals played
a prominent role, this process developed
faster. Furthermore, pace Kotkin and his
co-author Gross, civil society was not only a
political fantasy devised by idealistic dissi-

T
he role of ideas in the demise of Com-
munist regimes can never be stressed
too much. These “ideocratic partocra-
cies”, in Martin Malia’s phrase, could not out-
live the death of their utopian underpinnings.
Societies in East Central Europe, the Soviet
Union and elsewhere had been rebuilt accord-
ing to ideological blueprints: the command
economy, the New Man, universal surveil-
lance over mind and body. By the 1980s, the
time of the true believers had passed, even
if many retained their Party cards. It was the
VLADIMIR TISMANEANU of the revolutions to the crises of world Com-
munism: the Hungarian revolution of 1956,
Victor Sebestyen the Prague Spring of 1968, and the birth of
Solidarity. He also connects events in East
REVOLUTION 1989 Central Europe to the struggle for power in
The fall of the Soviet Empire the Kremlin and the Red Army’s humiliating
451pp. Orion. £25. defeat in Afghanistan. The Soviet reluctance
978 0 297 85223 0 to intervene in Poland in 1981, when Solidar-
Constantine Pleshakov ity was clearly turning into an alternative
centre of power, badly dented the confidence
THERE IS NO FREEDOM of local satraps.
WITHOUT BREAD! Sebestyen provides a vivid portrait of the
1989 and the civil war that brought
Pope, who had experienced both the Nazi
occupation and the Stalinist dictatorship, con-
verged with Ronald Reagan’s conviction that
the Soviet Union was the embodiment of
evil. The Pope’s vision found its counterpart
in the American President’s speech at the
Brandenburg Gate in 1987, when Reagan
urged Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. At
the time, this request sounded utopian. Two
years later it became fact. Pleshakov refers
extensively to the diary of the Pope’s confes-
sor, Father Stanislaw Dziwisz, who docu-
opposition in Hungary, the Free Democrats,
who were not a trade union, as Meyer writes.
Its leaders, centred on the philosopher János
Kis, had formulated a post-totalitarian agenda
which called for a “new social contract”.
Another proto-party, FIDESZ, led by Viktor
Orbán and his “MTV democrats”, as the dissi-
dent Miklós Haraszti once called them, was
not just a bunch of romantic youths. They had
studied law in Hungary and in England, and
wanted to re-create civil society, Rechtsstaat,
and a vibrant market.
dent philosophers, but a political myth
capable of mobilizing the public and of inspir-
ing independent reflection and mass protest.
Political myths are to be judged not in terms
of their truthfulness, but of their potential to
become true: speaking about civil society led
to the emergence of civil society. In East
Central Europe, exhilarating new ideas, such
as the return to Europe, destroyed obsolete
ideas. People took to the streets in Berlin,
Leipzig, Prague, Budapest and Timi£oara
convinced that the hour of the citizen had
HANS KUNDNANI
Patrick Salmon, Keith Hamilton
and Stephen Twigge, editors
DOCUMENTS ON BRITISH POLICY
OVERSEAS
Series III, Volume VII: German Reunification
1989–1990
592pp. Routledge. £90.
978 0 415 55002 4
number of Germans believe that it will take
place within ten years. The following morning,
his counterpart in East Berlin, Nigel Broom-
field, reports to Hurd that a growing number of
East Germans are now demanding immediate
reunification. Later that day, Kohl announced
his Ten-Point Plan in the Bundestag without
consulting the British beforehand. Mallaby
sends Hurd another telegram at the end of the
day after finally being briefed by Kohl’s
adviser Horst Teltschik, who has told Mallaby
that even Kohl’s plan “could be overtaken by

revolt, and the revival, of the mind that killed
the Communist Leviathan, not just among
dissidents, but also among disenchanted Com-
munist intellectuals, who had become increas-
ingly convinced of the system’s decrepitude.
Sickness, however, can be an excruciatingly
long process, and in the mid-1980s, Timothy
Garton Ash, an astute interpreter of Central
European politics, used the predictive
metaphor of “Ottomanization”. Later, the
philosopher Leszek Kolakowski insisted that
while everyone (even the leaders) had known
that Communist regimes could not last for-
ever, hardly anyone foresaw when the debacle
would occur. The German Democratic Rep-
ublic continued to be praised for its alleged
economic achievements, and in 1987 Erich
Honecker was received with state honours by
Helmut Kohl. The events of 1989 showed
clearly the essential unpredictability of revolu-
tions. Their logic is quite distinct from the
“normal” logic of adaptation, survival and con-
formity. They fuel passion, idealism and high
expectation, and they tend to be followed by
frustration and disappointment (a cycle antici-
pated by the late Ralf Dahrendorf in his Reflec-
tions on the Revolution in Europe, 1990).
Despite their apparent immortality, the
Leninist tyrannies succumbed ingloriously to
the rise of alternative movements, parties and
ideas. The upheaval that swept them away
astounded long-time observers of the region:
movements from below, usually perceived as
short-lived and insignificant, had proved
crucial. The revolutions were self-limiting
and refused to establish new ideological con-
straints. They repudiated official mythology
in the name of human decency and freedom.
They were anti-utopian, anti-teleological,
anti-eschatological. Their goal was neither to
“reshape” human nature, nor to erect scaf-
folds for the losers.
The most important step along the path to
1989 was the emergence in 1980 of Solidar-
ity, a self-governing trade union inspired by a
vision of liberty rooted in truth and respect
for human dignity, a vision articulated most
influentially, as all these books emphasize,
by Pope John Paul II. With its passionate
defence of individual rights, Solidarity was,
as Victor Sebestyen argues in Revolution
1989, the first real workers’ revolution of the
twentieth century. When Martial Law was
proclaimed in Poland in 1981, many were
ready to write Solidarity’s obituary; yet the
movement survived beneath the ice, and
when General Wojciech Jaruzelski allowed
Solidarity to form the government in August
1989, the decisive threshold was crossed.
Sebestyen quotes the reaction of the Soviet
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to the
Stalinist leaders and their endless cynicism: mented John Paul’s conviction that there was
down Communism
the frantic womanizing of the apparently a connection between the Marian apparition
304pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26.
978 0 374 28002 7
Spartan Erich Honecker; the murderousness at Fatima in 1917 and the demise of Commu-
of Erich Mielke, the Stasi chief who cut his nism. For the Pope, bringing down Commu-
Michael Meyer teeth assassinating Trotskyists and anarchists nism was a divine imperative. For Pleshakov,
during the Spanish Civil War; the pathologi- the revolutions of 1989 were first and fore-
THE YEAR THAT CHANGED THE
cal vanity of Nicolae Ceau£escu; and the most a series of domestic events. In these con-
WORLD
narrow-minded slyness of the Soviet lackey flicts of rulers and ruled, international actors
The untold story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall
254pp. Scribner. $28. Todor Zhivkov who, when asked whether he served to catalyse rather than determine the
978 1 4165 5845 3 had remained a committed Marxist-Leninist denouement. John Paul’s role was paramount
until the end of his thirty-five-year rule of precisely because he was a Polish Pope,
Stephen Kotkin, with Jan T. Gross Bulgaria, replied: “Do you take me for an whose words and actions influenced political
idiot?”. Unimaginative and arrogant, these actors in his homeland.
UNCIVIL SOCIETY leaders had lost all trace of the egalitarian As for Mikhail Gorbachev, whom many
1989 and the implosion of the Communist creed of their youth. Socialism in one family, scholars credit with encouraging dramatic
establishment Romania’s contribution to Marxism, was changes in the region, Pleshakov’s conclu-
197pp. Modern Library. $24.
more the experiment of a Sultan than an effort sion is acerbically dismissive. He describes
978 0 679 64276 3
to create a classless utopia. Sebestyen also the Soviet leader as “the husband of all wives
writes convincingly about the delusional and the wife of all husbands”, a reformer who
Polish breakthrough, as told by his chief universe of Ceau£escu’s cult of personality, did not anticipate, and most likely did not
adviser: “He took it calmly. There was no though some corrections are needed: two wish for, the disintegration of the empire.
way he was going to take any action. He said: prime ministers mentioned in the book, There can be little doubt, however, that
‘Forget about it.’ We remained on the beach Manea Mánescu and Ilie Verde[, were not in the arrival in the Kremlin in 1985 of this
and started talking to ourselves in our swim- fact related to Nicolae Ceau£escu, and the Marxist revisionist dramatically altered the
ming trunks. ‘Do you understand what is dictator’s eldest son Valentin was not rules of the game, the threshold of expecta-
going to happen?’ he said. ‘We are going adopted. Ceau£escu’s regime was a form tions and what might be seen as the structure
to lose our allies, the Warsaw Pact. These of dynasticism in the making, a scenario of revolutionary opportunities. As the late
countries will go their own ways. Yes, we which suited the top apparatchiks very well Rita Klimova, a former Charter 77 activist,
will suffer. We will lose our jobs’. It was no (Zhivkov imitated it, and it was later perfected once told me, Gorbachev was a necessary,
problem to project the collapse of the empire. in North Korea). State socialism died because but far from sufficient, condition. Renounc-
Our empire was doomed. But we did not of the lies at the heart of the political system ing the Brezhnev doctrine expressed both
think it would come so soon”. itself: lies about economy, society, culture. As Gorbachev’s belief that socialism was power-
Revolution 1989 is a superbly written and the late Kolakowski once put it, “the lie is the ful enough in the former satellite countries to
impressively documented chronicle of the immortal soul of communism”. For Václav defend itself without direct Soviet interven-
year John Paul II described as an annus Havel, Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuro± and other tion, and the loss of imperial impetus among
mirabilis. Sebestyen rightly traces the origins dissidents, truth had a revolutionary power. Soviet top elites. Unbeknownst to his Polit-
buro colleagues, Gorbachev still cherished
some of the ideals of the Prague Spring, and
he tried to rejuvenate Marxism-Leninism by
resuming Alexander Dubcek’s search for a
more humane version of socialism. All this
was a godsend for East Central Europe and a
self-defeating strategy for Gorbachev, who
lost the outer empire and unleashed forces
within the USSR that were to destroy Lenin’s
inheritance.
In their books, the journalist Michael Meyer
and the historian Stephen Kotkin offer further
challenges to the dominant explanations of the
revolutions of 1989. In The Year that Changed
the World, Meyer examines struggles within
the Hungarian elite before the collapse. He
focuses on what he sees as the decisive role of
a small coterie of anti-Communist Commu-
nists (the Harvard-educated Prime Minister
Miklós Németh and maverick Politburo
member Imre Pozsgay) in devising the poli-
cies that led to the mass exodus of East
Germans via Hungary in the summer of 1989
The Warsaw Solidarity leader Maciej Jankowski marching among protesters and the final demise of the GDR. For Meyer,
at an anti-government rally, 1991 Hungary’s decision to open its border with
In Uncivil Society, an illuminating and
bracing study, Kotkin argues that what
happened in 1989 was not an explosion, in
the manner of the Budapest revolt of 1956,
but an implosion. Supported by Jan T. Gross
in his chapter on Poland, Kotkin refutes the
civil society paradigm in his interpretation
of Communism’s collapse, stressing that
civic movements, grass-roots organizations,
and informal associations were embryonic
and seemingly powerless in most countries
of East Central Europe. He accepts that
Solidarity represented an alternative to the
Communist hegemony, but finds little to
compare it with in the cases of Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Germany, and still
less in the Balkans (all these books leave
Yugoslavia and Albania to one side, which is
understandable, if not entirely justified).
Kotkin offers “a narrative of global polit-
ical economy and a bankrupt political class
in a system that was largely bereft of correc-
tive mechanisms”. Like Meyer, he thinks
that Communist magnates, galvanized by
Gorbachev’s reformist course, engaged in
dismantling decaying regimes. International
economic crisis made the survival of the old
planning devices increasingly improbable, a
fact that ruling elites could not ignore. In
Kotkin’s analysis, the nomenklatura was the
real gravedigger of the Communist regimes,
from which it re-emerged as the main benefi-
ciary of predatory privatization (“from tanks
to banks”, as the saying went), consigning
former dissidents to increasing irrelevance.
To what he describes as civil society reveries,
Kotkin opposes an approach that highlights
the tribulations of the power-holders in the
nomenklatura. He calls this class “uncivil
society”. Accustomed to the perks and privi-
leges of patron–client relations, it treated the
people as a malleable mass, subject to ideo-
logically driven experiments in mandatory
happiness. Explaining the mystery of this
group’s political suicide is the true puzzle
Kotkin tries to solve. It had complete control
over resources, weapons, and the means of
communication, yet it surrendered power
without violent repression (Romania, of
course, was the exception).
Among scholars, the proponents of the
“civil society” explanation have included
Andrew Arato, Garton Ash, John Keane,
Jacques Rupnik and me. Among dissidents,
Havel and Michnik championed this line of
thought. None of us saw it as the sole reason
for the collapse. We simply insisted that,
with the ideological erosion of Leninist
regimes, society experienced a slow but
unstoppable re-awakening. In countries
which had a neo-Marxist, revisionist tradi-
arrived. This had been the thrust of dissident
movements ever since the 1970s, whether
in Havel’s path-breaking essay “The Power
of the Powerless” or Adam Michnik’s “The
New Evolutionism”, with their emphasis on
the restoration of civic dignity, the repudia-
tion of duplicity, and the construction of
islands of human autonomy that would event-
ually subvert the establishment.
So how are the tumultuous events of 1989
to be remembered? Kotkin starts his book
with a detailed discussion of the Romanian
film 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), whose
original title translates as “Was It or Was It
Not?”. The film presents a television talk
show devoted to what really happened in
December 1989 in a small provincial town.
Two guests remember the time quite differ-
ently, one claiming that he had protested
before the dictatorship’s end, the other saying
that he took to the streets only after he had
heard the regime was finished. Brilliantly
directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, the film
addresses some thorny questions. To what
extent was the revolution a reality in areas
where people started to demonstrate only
after the dictator had fled the Central Commit-
tee building? Was the revolution stolen, and
if so, by whom? What is one to make of the
return of former secret police bosses as
successful businessmen, a phenomenon
described as the conversion of the nomenklat-
ura? In the final scene, a woman phones in to
say: “I’m just calling to let you know it’s
snowing outside. It’s snowing big white
flakes. Enjoy it now, tomorrow it will be mud
. . . . Merry Christmas, everybody!”. Nicolae
and Elena Ceau£escu were executed on
Christmas Day following a judicial farce;
the Romanian Revolution took a toll of
over 1,400 victims; and the new leaders,
headed by the former ideological apparatchik
Ion Iliescu, pretended to embody the anti-
Communist rebellion while stifling the
beleaguered and fragile civil society.
And yet, to the extent that they replaced
one form of political, social and economic
system with another, the revolutions of 1989
were unequivocally genuine. Yes, there were
many masks and myths involved in the
events that took place in Bucharest, Prague or
Sofia. In most countries, the resilience of the
old elites prevented a radical coming to terms
with the Communist past. On the other hand,
those who took to the streets, the thousands
and thousands who were ready to die because
they wanted to be free, did not act as the pup-
pets of uncivil society. They believed in civil-
ity, decency and humanity, and they suc-
ceeded in rehabilitating these values. This is
the most significant lesson of 1989.
M
argaret Thatcher admitted in her
memoirs that her policy on German
reunification was an “unambiguous
failure”. Although she had welcomed the
democratic revolution in East Germany, she
was alarmed by the possibility of German
reunification that suddenly became very real
in the weeks that followed the fall of the
Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. She
believed Germany’s “national character”, as
well as its size and position in the centre of
Europe, made it an inherently “destabilizing
rather than a stabilizing force in Europe”. She
also worried, with some justification, that
rapid reunification might undermine Mikhail
Gorbachev’s position in the Soviet Union.
However, with President Bush all for German
reunification and Gorbachev unable to stop it,
Thatcher became almost completely isolated
over the next few months.
It has long been known that tensions
existed between Thatcher and the Foreign
Office, including her Foreign Secretary,
Douglas Hurd. To coincide with the twentieth
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
FCO has published a set of documents from
its and the Cabinet Office’s archives that
would normally have been released under the
thirty-year rule. They illustrate the full extent
of those tensions for the first time.
Although Britain had a long-standing
commitment to German unity through self-
determination, which Thatcher had herself
reiterated in 1985, some mandarins appear to
have had views on Germany that were not so
different from the Prime Minister’s. The col-
lection opens with a note from Sir Christo-
pher Mallaby, the British ambassador in
Bonn, which is almost Thatcherite in its
analysis of German pathology (the Germans,
he says, are “always yearning for some-
thing”). But during the course of 1989, the
FCO became increasingly concerned about
the possible effect of Thatcher’s reaction
to events in East Germany on relations with
Britain’s other allies. Sir Patrick Wright, the
Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the
FCO, worries at one point that “the Prime
Minister’s views, if they became known,
would raise eyebrows (at least) both in
Germany and in the United States”. On
November 10, Wright cautions Stephen Wall,
Hurd’s Private Secretary, that Thatcher might
be feeling “under siege” from her advisers.
The documents illustrate how quickly events
in East Germany began to move after Novem-
ber 9. On November 27, Mallaby describes
how the theme of reunification, “though still
shunned by Kohl and [Foreign Minister Hans-
Dietrich] Genscher, is becoming more promi-
nent in political debate”, and says a growing
other views before long”. So it proved.
The documents also raise some questions
about the complex and possibly duplicitous
role of the French in the negotiations.
Thatcher, who kept a map showing Ger-
many’s 1937 borders in her handbag, and took
it out in meetings to illustrate the “German
problem”, saw in President Mitterrand a
potential ally who might help her stop or slow
German reunification. However, although
Mitterrand shared some of Thatcher’s fears
about Germany, he came to see European inte-
gration (and in particular a single European
currency) as a possible solution to the “Ger-
man question”, whereas Thatcher thought it
would only exacerbate the problem.
According to most accounts, including
Thatcher’s own, the shift in Mitterrand’s posi-
tion was complete by the time of the crucial
meeting at the Elysée Palace on January 20,
1990. But according to the account of the meet-
ing kept by Charles Powell, Thatcher’s Private
Secretary, Mitterrand told Thatcher that he
still “shared her analysis” of the situation at
that point and feared the Germans, who were
acting “with a certain brutality”, might attempt
to regain territory they had lost as a result of
the war and “might make even more ground
than had Hitler” (the French Foreign Minister
at the time, Roland Dumas, has subsequently
denied Mitterrand made such a remark).
By February, however, the die had been
cast. From then on, as Hurd focused on
arrangements for the “Two Plus Four” negotia-
tions, Thatcher became even more openly
anti-German, culminating in the infamous
seminar on Germany at Chequers in March
(the minutes of which, written by Powell, are
attached as an appendix). These documents
suggest that by this point British officials were
working constructively on what Mallaby calls
“the modalities of unification” without any
real influence from her. In fact, they played a
crucial role in working out the detail of the
Two Plus Four negotiations (apparently they
possessed the only laptop at the talks, allow-
ing them to control the text as it was updated).
This diplomatic diligence rescued Britain
to some extent from what Patrick Salmon,
calls its “isolated rearguard action”, even if it
failed to change the public perception of Brit-
ish negativity towards reunification. In the end
the problem, as Salmon notes, was that Britain
had no leverage. Where Mitterrand was quick
to adjust his strategy to secure further Euro-
pean integration, Thatcher was slow to grasp
the inevitability of German reunification. But
even if she had been more realistic, it is
difficult to see what she might have got as a
quid pro quo for her acquiescence – except,
perhaps, greater popularity in Germany.