Down with Big Brother (47 page)

Burying the Brezhnev doctrine was facilitated by the fact that Soviet ideologists had always denied its existence. The term was an invention of Western Sovietologists, summarizing the arguments used by Moscow to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In theory the Soviet Union remained committed to the principles of equality, independence, and noninterference in international affairs. Gorbachev’s contribution was to give real content to what had hitherto been an empty slogan. When the Czechoslovak leader Gustáv Husák asked him for advice about personnel changes in the Communist Party, an area of vital concern to Brezhnev, Gorbachev refused to get involved. “It’s clearer to you what you should do than to us in Moscow,” he replied airily.
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His spokesman began talking about the “Sinatra doctrine”: Let everyone be able to say, “I do it my way.”
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“There never was any formal decision to refrain from the use of force in Eastern Europe,” said Aleksandr Yakovlev, who helped Gorbachev devise
his foreign policy strategy. “We simply stopped being hypocritical. For years we had told the entire world that these countries were free and independent, even though this was obviously not the case. There was no need to take a formal decision. We just had to implement what was already official policy.”
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Traditionally, Soviet foreign policy had been a prerogative of the general secretary. Although Ligachev and other conservatives repeatedly bemoaned the loss of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe at Politburo meetings, they were reluctant to challenge Gorbachev in an area that was clearly his responsibility. By his own account, Ligachev was more concerned about propping up socialism in East Germany than in Poland. He regarded the formation of a Solidarity-led government as Poland’s “internal affair.”
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By the time the conservatives realized what was happening, it was too late. The dominoes had begun to fall.

G
ORBACHEV LIKED
F
OROS
because it enabled him to escape the hothouse world of Kremlin politics. Dressed in shorts, a sports cap, and hiking boots, he spent two hours a day strolling through the mountains above the dacha with Raisa. Bodyguards trailed behind, with rucksacks loaded up with mineral water, two-way radios, and Kalashnikov sub-machine guns. Sometimes the Gorbachev family took an excursion by boat, down the indented Crimean coastline, as far as the white tsarist palace at Livadia, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had decided the fate of Europe in the dying days of World War II.

Outside visitors were rarely invited to Foros. The general secretary had no desire to socialize with his Politburo colleagues; there had always been a terrible sense of isolation and loneliness at the summit of Kremlin power. Gorbachev was surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, but he had very few personal friends. One outsider to penetrate the Gorbachev family circle was his foreign policy aide, Anatoly Chernyayev. The former diplomat regarded himself as the representative of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia in the Gorbachev court. He served as a debating foil for the general secretary and helped him with his speeches and theoretical works about perestroika. His meticulous, handwritten diary reflects Gorbachev’s concerns that summer, and the sense of a political and economic order that was falling apart:

Socialism is disappearing in Eastern Europe. Western Communist parties are collapsing everywhere where they have been unable to identify themselves with a national idea.… But the main thing is the disintegration of myths and unnatural forms of life in our own society. The planned economy is falling apart, the “image” of socialism is disappearing. Ideology, as such, no longer exists. The empire is falling apart. The party has lost its leading, dominating role, and repressive force, and is breaking up. The power [of the centralized state] has been shattered, and nothing has yet filled the vacuum. Signs of chaos are accumulating.…
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For Gorbachev, the upheavals in Eastern Europe were a sideshow to the main event, the revolution in the Soviet Union itself. Everywhere he looked, there were threats and challenges. Scarcely a day went by without a new crisis: an upsurge of ethnic violence in Uzbekistan; nationalist protests in the Baltic states; strikes by hundreds of thousands of coal miners in Ukraine and Siberia. His own ability to influence events and manipulate the public debate was rapidly declining, a process he found deeply frustrating. In private conversations with Chernyayev, he railed at the press for “stirring things up” and at the Balts for their selfish preoccupation with national independence, which threatened to torpedo the entire experiment in controlled reform. He was also troubled by the growing militancy of ethnic Russians, who had hitherto formed the backbone of the Soviet state.

“If Russia rises up, then it will really begin,” he commented bitterly. “It will be the end of empire.”

The dwindling personal authority of the father of perestroika was only part of a much larger crisis of power throughout the Soviet bloc. Moscow could no longer issue commands and expect them to be obeyed from Vilnius to Vladivostok, much less in Berlin and Budapest. Local authorities, and even individual citizens, were deciding for themselves which instructions they would implement. Students were evading the draft, factory managers were ignoring the plan, and newspaper editors were throwing Central Committee instructions into the garbage.

The crisis of power was particularly evident in the economic field. The centralized system of distribution had virtually broken down under the strain of the deepening economic crisis. Shortages of almost everything, from television sets to toilet paper, were causing local authorities to look for ways to protect their own consumers. A “shopping-bag war” had broken out in early 1989, when Czechoslovakia and East Germany banned the export of children’s clothing and certain food items to neighboring socialist states. The Soviet Union countered with a similar prohibition on the export of refrigerators, washing machines, and caviar. Regions, cities, and even villages
had joined the rush toward protectionism. In the middle of August Moscow city authorities announced that shoppers would have to produce residence permits in order to purchase a wide range of “deficit” items. The planned economy, with its rigidly formulated quotas and deadlines, had effectively given way to a rudimentary system of barter. In the absence of a free market, it was everyone for himself.

When the American secretary of state, James A. Baker III, visited Moscow in May, he urged Gorbachev to take the first step toward the creation of a market by abolishing state controls over prices. The Soviet leader had been resisting similar advice from his own economists because he feared a popular backlash over rising prices. Baker, a former treasury secretary, urged Gorbachev to act quickly while he still enjoyed a “credit of trust.” “If we did this, people really would lose confidence in us,” Gorbachev replied. “We are already twenty years late with price reform. It’s impossible to turn things around in two or three years.”
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What Baker failed to understand—and Gorbachev could not acknowledge—was that the “credit of trust” in perestroika had already expired.

A
LTHOUGH
G
ORBACHEV WAS PREOCCUPIED
with domestic affairs, he could not help paying some attention to events in Poland during his Foros vacation. Negotiations were under way for the formation of a Solidarity-led government under the premiership of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a veteran Catholic editor and former political prisoner. The Communists had been promised two ministerial portfolios—defense and internal affairs—but wanted more. Everybody understood that a major turning point in the postwar history of Eastern Europe had been reached. For the first time ever a ruling Communist Party was on the threshold of surrendering effective political power.

Communist leaders elsewhere in Eastern Europe were dismayed by the prospect of a Solidarity-led government in Poland, but most of them understood that they were powerless to prevent it. The exception was the maverick Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu. A Stalinist diehard who headed the most repressive regime in Eastern Europe, Ceauşescu had managed to win plaudits from Western statesmen by occasionally distancing himself from Moscow. In August 1968 he had been the sole Soviet bloc leader to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia, on the ground that it violated the principle of national sovereignty. The threat to Communist rule in Poland caused a 180-degree turn in Ceauşescu’s foreign policy. From
being the champion of national independence he had now became the staunchest advocate of the defunct Brezhnev doctrine.

At midnight on August 19 the Polish ambassador in Bucharest was hauled out of bed and presented with an urgent diplomatic note from the Romanian government, setting forth Ceauşescu’s views on the crisis. Denouncing Solidarity as the hireling of “international imperialism,” the note called on the Polish army to facilitate the formation of a “government of national salvation,” led by the Communists. It said that the remaining Warsaw Pact countries had both the right and the obligation to take joint action to defend the “cause of socialism” in Poland.
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Precisely what kind of action Ceauşescu had in mind was not specified, but the note implied that he favored some kind of decisive military intervention.

Poland rejected the Romanian demand, as did other Warsaw Pact members. Three days later, on August 22, Gorbachev endorsed the formation of a Solidarity-led government in Poland, in a forty-minute telephone conversation with Mieczysřaw Rakowski, the new leader of the Polish Communist Party. Gorbachev had taken a personal dislike to the megalomaniac Romanian
conducător
and his domineering wife, Elena. The grotesque personality cult surrounding the couple reminded him of the worst days of Stalin. At Warsaw Pact meetings Ceauşescu had been gratuitously offensive, pouring scorn on perestroika and presenting Romania as the model for other Communist countries to follow. The debate became so heated during one session that the bodyguards outside the room were sent away, so that they would not hear two general secretaries yelling at each other. Relations between the two wives were equally bad-tempered.
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“Ceauşescu fears for his own skin,” Gorbachev told Rakowski, dismissing the Romanian call for a Warsaw Pact intervention in Poland.
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Although he had no intention of stopping the formation of a Solidarity-led government, Gorbachev was troubled by the stunning electoral defeat suffered by Communist reformers in Poland. He felt a political kinship with Jaruzelski, the first East European leader to embrace the ideas of perestroika, and apply them in his own country. As their reward for leading the rest of the Soviet bloc in the transition to democracy, the Polish reformers had been unceremoniously booted out of office. There were worrying portents here for the Soviet Union and for Gorbachev himself. He told Rakowski that the only solution was the construction of a new political party, purged of conservatives.

“You must build a new party. You won’t be able to accomplish anything with the old lot. Not even crap,” he told Rakowski, apologizing for his use of the Russian vernacular.

The Soviet leader insisted that Moscow would stick by the Polish reformers and continued to support the “line of agreement” pursued by Jaruzelski. Soviet “support” for Poland would remain unchanged, provided the Polish “opposition” behaved in a reasonable and responsible way. If the opposition attempted to overthrow the existing “constitutional order,” then the Kremlin would be obliged to review its policy toward Poland. “You can tell that to the opposition.” Gorbachev did not say precisely what he had in mind, but the implication was that the Soviet Union would cut back supplies of subsidized oil and raw materials.

Without the threat of military force to back it up, it was inevitable that this latest line in the sand would soon be swept away. Events were now moving faster than anyone, including Gorbachev, could possibly anticipate. The next few months were to witness the crumbling of Moscow’s East European empire and the shattering of a geopolitical arrangement that had been in place for more than four decades.

T
HE PACE OF CHANGE
began to accelerate a few hours after Gorbachev got off the phone with Rakowski. Unbeknownst to either man, the foreign minister of Hungary made a decision, in the privacy of his Budapest home, that led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin Wall less than three months later.

Gyula Horn was grappling with the kind of excruciating moral and political dilemma familiar to many Communist reformers that summer. Over the past few months Hungary had been transformed into a holding pen for tens of thousands of East German refugees. Very few were political dissidents. For the most part they were young people, fed up with the austerity of life under communism and the never-ending snooping of the secret police. They had given up on their dogmatic Communist leaders, who seemed allergic to the very idea of reform, and were voting with their feet. From Hungary they wanted nothing more than safe passage to the bright lights of capitalism in West Germany. “There is no future for us in the East” was a common refrain. The foreign minister had to decide whether to let them go or keep them penned up in the Communist East.

On the one hand, Hungary had binding treaty obligations to East Germany. Under a bilateral agreement, signed in 1968, the Hungarian government had undertaken not to permit East German citizens to travel to the West via Hungary. If Budapest violated this treaty, Horn feared that Communist hard-liners in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest would find a way of getting even. On the other hand, he knew that his government would appear hypocritical, and hopelessly behind the times, if it failed to live up to its new
humanistic principles. A few months earlier Hungary had signed international agreements pledging to promote freedom of travel between states and to protect the rights of refugees. The way the Hungarian government handled the issue of East German refugees was a crucial test of the sincerity of its commitment to democracy and human rights.