Down with Big Brother (42 page)

In the emotional aftermath of the Tbilisi “massacre,” reason and common sense were in short supply. Revolted by the shedding of innocent blood, Georgians rallied around the leaders who denounced the Soviet “imperialists” the loudest. At this point the Communist authorities made a series of blunders that played right into the hands of the nationalists. They arrested Gamsakhurdia and other opposition leaders, endowing them with the halos of martyrs. Then, for almost two weeks, the army denied using
toxic gas against the demonstrators. Panic swept the city as hundreds of people were admitted to local hospitals with symptoms of poisoning. Anti-Soviet sentiment reached a fever pitch. By the time Gamsakhurdia was released from prison several weeks later, the role of one of his father’s heroes seemed ready-made for him. A year and a half after “Bloody Sunday,” he was to win the first free election in Georgian history, by a two-to-one margin.

For ordinary Soviets, the Tbilisi tragedy became a chilling reminder of just how easily democratic reforms could be reversed. It was a lesson driven home a few weeks later, by an even greater tragedy on the other side of the Communist world.

BEIJING
May 17, 1989

“W
E SALUTE THE
A
MBASSADOR OF
D
EMOCRACY
,” read the placards in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the world’s most populous nation. “In the Soviet Union, They Have Gorbachev. What Do We Have?”

When Mikhail Gorbachev decided to put an end to three decades of enmity between the Soviet Union and China, he could scarcely have imagined the turmoil he would unleash. During the course of his three-day stay in Beijing, authority on the streets of the Chinese capital had passed from the “People’s government” to the people themselves. The ostensible purpose of the visit was overshadowed by the biggest display of popular defiance in the history of Communist China. On the eve of Gorbachev’s arrival, several thousand students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to publicize their demand for democratic reforms. By the day he left, the protest had spread to dozens of provincial cities. In Beijing alone more than a million people poured into the streets to express support for the students and call for the removal of unpopular Chinese leaders, beginning with Deng Xiaoping.

The demonstrators represented every conceivable walk of life. There were schoolchildren and steelworkers, bankers and bellhops, diplomats and doctors, artists and artisans. There were contingents from the training school of the Public Security Bureau, the Chinese secret police, and the Peopie’s
Liberation Army. Even Beijing’s notorious criminal gangs, the
liumang
, took part in the festivities, declaring a moratorium on petty crime for the duration of the protest and acting as the self-appointed guardians of public order.

The protesters arrived in the center of the city on bicycles and pickups, in trucks and buses, by taxi and on foot. As they marched down the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, past the luxury hotels that were the sign of China’s explosive economic growth, and the entrance to the Forbidden City, where Deng and other Chinese leaders had their residences, to Tiananmen Square, the normally drab city became the backdrop for an astonishing political carnival. A host of sounds filled the air: the sirens of ambulances evacuating weakened hunger strikers from the square, the applause of bystanders, the drumbeats of marching bands, firecrackers, bicycle bells, and chants of “Down with corruption” and “We want democracy.” There were cries of “Deng Xiaoping, go and play bridge,” a reference to the favorite pastime of the ailing eighty-four-year-old leader. One group of protesters climbed to the roof of the History Museum, overlooking the hundred-acre square, and erected large banners reading “We Are the Soul of China” and “Perseverance Is Victory.”

It was a Communist regime’s worst nightmare, a popular uprising embracing all sections of society. The masses were symbolically reoccupying the square where Mao Zedong, standing on top of Tiananmen Gate, had proclaimed the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949. A secular shrine bordered by the Forbidden City and the Great Hall of the People, Tiananmen Square had played a fateful role in Chinese history. It had been the setting for nationalist riots and fanatical Red Guard rallies, military parades and student protests, solemn state funerals and dissident demonstrations. But it had never witnessed scenes like this.

Watching the sea of humanity pour into the square, I was reminded of the early days of the Solidarity movement. The size of this demonstration was several times larger than anything I had seen in Poland, even during the pope’s visit, but the exuberance and infectious gaiety of the crowds were very similar. After decades of passively submitting to totalitarian rule, the people were rebelling against their masters. The artificial barriers between different social classes and different age-groups were being swept away, allowing a pulverized and atomized society to discover its own strength. What had long been banned was suddenly permitted. As in Poland in August 1980, there was a sense of sheer improbability about what was happening that left people rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

The protests forced extensive changes in Gorbachev’s schedule, beginning
with the arrival ceremony, which was moved from Tiananmen Square to the airport. The switch was made so abruptly that protocol officials were unable to roll out the usual red carpet. On his second day in Beijing, Gorbachev had to be smuggled into the Great Hall of the People through an obscure service entrance in the rear because the rest of the building was under siege by students. Planned excursions to the Forbidden City and the Imperial Palace were canceled. On the final day of the visit hundreds of journalists battled their way into the Great Hall for a promised end-of-summit press conference, only to learn that Gorbachev was stranded at his official residence, six miles away. There was only one solution. Since the Soviet leader was unable to reach his own press conference, the conference would have to go to him. The resulting obstacle chase, through streets filled with banner-waving demonstrators, was one of the zanier highlights of my journalistic career.

All semblance of organization and protocol had irretrievably broken down. We poured out of the Great Hall, followed closely by a small army of Soviet and Chinese officials, interpreters, and technicians. A motley fleet of bicycles, rickshaws, and minivans was commandeered for the mad dash across town. Cheered on by a carload of Gorbachev’s security men, a dozen of us piled onto the back of a passing pickup. “Follow us,” the KGB men shouted as they careered down an avenue filled with chanting protesters. Entering the spirit of the occasion, one of the security men held up a photo of Gorbachev and began flashing victory signs at the delighted demonstrators. Miraculously a path opened up through the million-strong multitude. Gripping the back of the pickup, we made a triumphant entrance to the government guesthouse where Gorbachev was staying. Soldiers in white gloves treated us as if we had arrived in a chauffeur-driven limousine, saluting smartly and waving our truck down a long driveway lined with artificial lakes and ornamental pagodas. Our friendly KGB escorts never made it to the news conference. Their decrepit Soviet Lada overheated in a gigantic traffic jam. They were last seen gazing disconsolately under the hood as steam billowed from the radiator.

While many Chinese students regarded Gorbachev as a symbol of democracy, he was careful not to say anything that would embarrass his official hosts. He used the press conference to express the hope that the crisis would be resolved through “dialogue” and “negotiation.” But he also seemed to chide the protesters for wanting to move too far, too fast. “We, too, have hotheads who want to renovate socialism overnight,” he told Chinese officials at one point. “But it doesn’t happen like that in real life. Only in fairy tales.”
²⁰

G
ORBACHEV HAD GOOD REASON
not to gloat over the misfortunes of the Chinese Communists, for he had numerous troubles of his own. After four years in power, the length of an American presidential term, his political authority was rapidly eroding. He could no longer evade responsibility for the economic cataclysm hanging over the Soviet Union by denouncing the misguided policies of his predecessors. He himself was also to blame.

His political position seemed secure enough. Shortly before leaving for Beijing, Gorbachev had succeeded in purging the Central Committee of one-quarter of its members, replacing representatives of the old guard with his own supporters. In other respects, however, his policies were beginning to unravel. Perestroika contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.

By introducing elements of democracy into a totalitarian state, Gorbachev had released destructive centrifugal forces that were threatening to tear the Soviet Union apart. The upheavals in Georgia were a symptom of long-smoldering nationalist grievances that were spreading around the fringes of the old Russian empire and threatening to spill over into the traditional Slavic heartland. The relaxation of central controls had also had a devastating impact on the economy. The old rules had ceased to apply, but no new rules had been devised to take their place. The Soviet Union had entered a kind of economic twilight zone, where nobody could be sure of anything. The once-rigid five-year plan had been reduced to a catalog of empty promises. The ruble had plummeted in value because of a succession of catastrophic budget deficits. Since prices were still controlled by the state, the result was long lines and rationing by scarcity. Unable to rely on the promises of the planners and mistrusting their own currency, consumers and producers had retreated to a primitive barter system.

Gorbachev was paying the price for allowing political reform to outpace economic reform. The Chinese leaders, by contrast, had made dramatic strides toward a market economy but continued to deny freedom to their citizens. Both variants of reform were inherently unstable. The students who surged onto the streets of Beijing during Gorbachev’s visit were a perfect illustration of the disparity between economic progress and political stagnation. It was no longer possible to seal the Middle Kingdom from the outside world. Thanks to Deng’s modernization campaign and “open-door policy,” tens of thousands of Chinese students had studied at universities in the United States and Europe. Millions more had been affected by the information revolution that had swept across Chinese campuses. The more the
students learned about the rest of the world, the more critical they became of the defects in their own society and the abuse of power by the Communist elite. Li Chaojie, a philosophy student at Beijing University, was speaking for many of his fellow protesters when he told me: “In China, power means money, the ability to do whatever you want. Corruption is everywhere. That is why we need democracy: in order to make those in power responsible for their actions.”
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By the time Gorbachev arrived in Beijing, it was clear not only that communism had failed but that reform communism had also failed. China and the Soviet Union had taken opposite paths to reform, and both were in deep crisis. The Chinese reforms ignored the yearning for freedom; the Soviet reforms ignored the yearning for a better life.

In some respects, the course of the two reform efforts was preordained. Gorbachev was haunted by the memory of the 1964 Kremlin coup against Nikita Khrushchev, the last reformer to hold the office of general secretary. When the nomenklatura judged that Khrushchev had gone too far, they simply got rid of him, and nobody made the slightest protest. In order to prevent the same thing from happening to him, Gorbachev attempted to create new political institutions to counterbalance the power of the party. By unleashing the forces of glasnost, he ensured that the public would know what was going on and have the ability to react. “I often said to my colleagues when we began perestroika: ‘If we do not think up something new, we will meet the same fate as Khrushchev,’ ” Gorbachev later acknowledged. “That was when we started on the first free elections.”
²²

For the Chinese Communists, the Gorbachev tactic of arousing public opinion against the nomenklatura was frighteningly reminiscent of their Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao had used a similar strategy in the mid-sixties, when he saw his dream of a socialist utopia begin to fade. The excesses of the Red Guards had left thousands of senior Chinese Communists, Deng included, with an abiding horror of spontaneous mass movements that could not be strictly controlled by the party. The fact that Gorbachev intended perestroika to be a peaceful revolution mattered little to Deng, who feared a general descent into chaos and anarchy. The memory of how he had been forced to make a humiliating self-criticism, stripped of all his leadership positions, separated from his family, and shipped off to the countryside was the most searing experience of his life, more terrible even than the Long March. His eldest son, a student at Beijing University, had been paralyzed from the waist down after leaping out of a fourth-floor window in an attempted suicide, while being persecuted by Red Guards.
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