Central and Eastern European States -
Towards 1989:
Year of Revolution
'…try to imagine why people came out
on to the streets in 1989. Even after we take into account such
important reasons for the massive support for change, we still need
to understand why people felt they could behave as they did in Wrocław,
Prague or Leipzig. Dissidents, no matter how famous in the West, could
no more be an instigator of that popular upheaval than was Mikhail
Gorbachev. Would most people risk repression because of a text by an
imprisoned playwright or a speech by a communist leader? Hardly – no
more than it was likely that crowds in Petrograd in 1917 had studied
Marx and Lenin. Ideas – even those about freedom and oppression, or
about economic deprivation – do not translate automatically into action.
‘ Kenney :12
Poland 1981-1989
Despite initial appearances to
the contrary, the imposition of martial law by Jaruzelski did
not bear comparison with the process of ‘Normalization’
undertaken by Gustáv Husák in Czechoslovakia after the Prague
Spring. Although Jaruzelski attacked Solidarity and its
leadership, he at no point sought to rewind time. He accepted that
Poland had been changed for good by the Solidarity days. For example,
although initially the media and artists were once again controlled, as
long as they distanced themselves from Solidarity they were largely left
alone. The same was true of the Catholic Church which under the
leadership of Archbishop Glemp reached a satisfactory accommodation with
the Jaruzelski regime. And what of Solidarity? Despite the highly
successful decapitation of the Solidarity leadership, a few
activists did escape capture and continued the opposition
underground.New leaders
like Zbigniew Bujak, inspired by Václav Havel, continued the tradition
of KOR’s anti-politics. This meant not choosing between revolution and
compromise but rather undermining the state by ignoring it. This did not
require an organised, centralised opposition but rather localised,
personal resistance.
The Underground Society
‘Instead of organizing
ourselves as an underground state, we should be organizing ourselves as
an underground society… Such a movement should strive for a situation in
which the government will control empty shops but not the market,
employment but not the means to livelihood, the state press but not the
flow of information, printing houses but not the publishing movement,
telephones and the postal service but not communication, schools but not
education’.
(Wiktor Kulerski quoted in Stokes: 106)
Compared with the relative intellectual isolation of
Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, underground Solidarity found widespread,
popular support for a resistance campaign. It is significant that all
this occurred before Mikhail Gorbachev and Glasnost. However, the decentralised anti-political actions encouraged by Solidarity also
created problems for the organisation. Solidarity’s underground
leadership, the Temporary Coordinating Commission (TKK) faced
difficulties in trying to organise more traditional protests and
strikes. To some extent, a generational divide opened up between old
Solidarity and the plethora of anti-political movements that
Jaruzelski’s actions had encouraged and of which underground Solidarity
was merely one representative.
The Battle of the Crosses
In Warsaw first old women
and then students began placing flowers in the form of a large cross in
Victory Square to memorialise the late Cardinal Wyszyński. Each night
the police would clear the square and wash away the flowers. And the
next morning first one old woman and then another would appear with her
carnations and the process would be repeated. By mid-1982 the
authorities had to close off the square to end the ‘battle of the
crosses' Stokes 108
In October 1982, the government
established ‘self-governing’ unions that would accept the
‘leading role’ of the Communist Party that Solidarity had
refused. About 2.5 million workers signed up to these unions and
a Solidarity led national protest strike against them proved
disappointing. On November 12th Jaruzelski
felt confident enough to release Lech Wałęsa from prison. 1983 and 1984 were difficult years for Solidarity,
although out of prison the leadership was continually harassed and
despite receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Wałęsa was unable to motivate a
populace that was benefiting from a slightly improved economic
situation. Local elections in 1984 produced a turnout of at least 60%,
despite calls from Solidarity for a boycott. The state with the
collaboration of Cardinal Glemp and the Catholic Church in Poland seemed
to have Solidarity under control. Solidarity may have been under
political control but the social forces that had been released in 1981
refused to go back in the bottle. Jaruzelski, to his credit, realised
this. Political control was exercised alongside judicious reforms and
concessions.
Events surrounding the murder of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko
illustrated this very well. Popiełuszko, a pro-Solidarity priest was
found dead in October 1984; remarkably, Jaruzelski put the security
police responsible for the murder on public trial. This allowed
Jaruzelski to both win popular support and to undermine conservative
opposition in the Party.
In September 1986, Jaruzelski granted an
amnesty to all people who had been detained during martial law. This was
the pre-requisite that Solidarity had required from the government
before it would enter into discussions. Ten days later, Wałęsa formed
the Solidarity Provisional Council and although not legal, Solidarity
was no longer entirely underground. Jaruzelski quickly became Mikhail
Gorbachev’s most open supporter of Glasnost and oversaw the most
liberalized of Eastern Bloc societies. International economic sanctions
were dropped and in September 1987, Vice-President Bush made an official
visit to Poland meeting both Jaruzelski and Wałęsa. As Gale
Stokes argues, ‘In this new atmosphere it was the government
that seemed to retain the reform initiative, not the
opposition.’ (117)
Father Jerzy Popiełuszko
What would make Jaruzelski’s delicate balancing act impossible to sustain, was the
underlying weakness of the Polish economy. By 1987 the Polish economy
was once again on the verge of collapse; the shortage economy was
famously summed up by Adam Michnik when he said ‘everybody’s fondest
dream was to be able to find a roll of toilet paper’. The government
proposed some radical reforms including the creation of private firms,
but also significant austerity measures which would result in major
price rises. But most radical of all was how they planned to introduce
the changes. On the 29th November 1987 the government conducted a
national referendum asking for the public for their approval of the
changes.
When the government unexpectedly declared itself defeated,
Solidarity announced that Poland had entered ‘a new phase’ and that the
‘war was over’. (Stokes: 120) In early 1988, the Solidarity leadership
fought to maintain discipline and control over the rank and file, as
widespread strikes broke out. For the young strikers, many of whom were
not Solidarity members, the lack of militancy of the Solidarity
leadership or ‘senators’ as they characterized them, was a sign of
weakness. In August 1988, Wałęsa was called to a secret meeting in
Warsaw with Minister of Defence, General Kiszczak. If Wałęsa could get
the strikes called off, the government offered to discuss the
legalisation of Solidarity. Despite contrary advice from many of his
closest advisers, Wałęsa agreed and after three days of cajoling, the
workers went back.
Jaruzelski also faced internal opposition to his plan
of legalising Solidarity. The central committee plenum broke up without
reaching a decision in December 1988 and only the threat of Jaruzelski’s
resignation in January 1989, forced the decision through. The historic
round-table discussions between the government, the Church, ‘opposition’
political parties, intellectuals and trade unions including Solidarity
began on February 6th 1989. The most significant decisions were that
Solidarity would be legally recognized and would be given minority
representation in the new parliament. Solidarity would be allowed to
contest 35% of the seats in the Sejm (the lower house) and all of the
seats in the new upper house, the Senate.
The elections were called
for June 4th, allowing Solidarity just two months to prepare. In
addition, the Communist Party coalition candidates would have the
advantage of staff, offices, money and a monopoly over the media.
Despite this, Solidarity prepared well; they nominated one candidate per
seat, produced striking posters featuring images of Wałęsa and the
famous Solidarity logo and they relied on a national network of enthused
volunteers. Nobody anywhere predicted the sensational results. After the
second round of voting, Solidarity candidates won all 161 seats they
contested in the Sejm and 99 out of the 100 seats available in the
Senate.
Solidarity
poster signed by Wałęsa
High Noon Tomasz
Sarnecki
2+2 must be 4
Tomaszewski
Election
'89 Bałuk-Zaborowska E
‘They must have known they would win! But they didn’t.
I sat with an exhausted and depressed Adam Michnik over lunch that
Sunday, and he did not know. I drank with a nervously excited Jacek
Kuroń late that evening, and he did not know. Nobody knew.’ Historian
and eyewitness Timothy Garton Ash – The Magic Latern 1990.
Immediately after the election, Jaruzelski proposed
that Solidarity enter into a coalition government. At this stage,
Solidarity refused, apparently unprepared for power, the leadership was
content with the role of opposition and making a serious challenge to
the communists in four years time. But events would not allow them this
luxury. In the space of a few weeks, Solidarity’s social influence was
being overtaken by Solidarity’s political power. This had already been
manifested with the Sejm election of Jaruzelski to the presidency which
required seven Solidarity members to deliberately spoil their ballot
papers to ensure that the general was elected. The power of Solidarity
was further revealed when it became clear in August that the prospective
communist Prime Minister, General Kiszczak was unable to form a
government. Now it was Solidarity’s turn to propose a coalition
government, this time on their terms and with their prime minister,
Tadeusz Mazowiecki. After a phone call from Gorbachev and the assurance
from Solidarity that Polish membership of the Warsaw Pact was not
threatened, Jaruzelski accepted Wałęsa’s coalition proposal. As Garton
Ash put it, ‘the chalice thus passed from the gentleman-gaoler [General
Kiszczak] to the gentleman prisoner, for Mazowiecski, like most of the
top Solidarity leadership, had been interned for a year under martial
law’. (Garton-Ash 1990: 40) On the 21st of August, the 21st anniversary
of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 10,000 people took to the
streets of Czechoslovakia. They sang ‘Long Live Dubček’, but they also
sang ‘Long Live Poland’. The success of Solidarity was about to
influence the most extraordinary autumn in living memory.
Eyewitness vs Historian
Timothy Garton-Ash was
an eyewitness to the revolutionary events he describes. He acknowledges
the advantages and disadvantages of the eyewitness compared to the
historian.
‘The disadvantages of the witness as against the historian
are those of partiality in space, time and judgement. The witness can
only be in one place at one time, and tends to attach an exaggerated
importance to what he personally saw or heard. The historian can gather
all the witnesses’ accounts and is generally unswayed by that first-hand
experience. What happened afterwards changes our view of what went
before. The historian usually knows more about what happened afterwards,
simply because he writes later. Finally, there is partiality in
judgement… Such are the grave disadvantages of a witness.
But there are
also advantages. The witness can, if he is lucky, see things that the
historian will not find in any document. Sometimes a glance, a shrug, a
chance remark, will be more revealing than a hundred speeches. In these
events, even more than in most contemporary history, much of great
importance was not written down at all, either because it occurred in
hasty conversations with no note-takers present, or because the business
was conducted on the telephone, or because the words or pictures came by
television. (The importance of television can hardly be overstated.
Future historians of these events will surely have to spend as much time
in television archives as in libraries.) The witness can see how things
that appear to have been spontaneous were actually rigged; but also how
things that appear to have been carefully arranged were in fact the
hapless product of sheer confusion. And perhaps the most difficult thing
of all for the historian to recapture is the sense of what, at a given
historical moment, people did not know about the future. TGA The Magic
Lantern 21-22
Czechoslovakia 1981-1989
In 1985, Mikhail
Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. He acknowledged the
mistakes of his predecessors and the comparative economic failure of the
Soviet Empire. The Eastern Bloc economies were unable to match the
technological advances achieved in the West or to keep up in the arms
race. Soviet attempts to intervene in support of their puppet regime in
Afghanistan were failing. Western leaders such as Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher, perhaps sensing their opponent’s weakness, had
departed from the accommodating rhetoric of 1970s Detente and characterised the Soviet Bloc as an “evil empire”.
Gorbachev called for
economic “perestroika” (restructuring), a relaxation of central planning
and the introduction of market forces. Hardliners within the Party
opposed this as a step towards capitalism. Gorbachev sought to widen the
debate through greater political “glasnost” (openness), a willingness to
discuss mistakes and allow the expression of alternative ideas. This liberalisation proved popular among non-Party members. However the lack
of internal Party unity on the issue of economic reform denied Gorbachev
the option of the Chinese model of economic reform accompanied by tight
political control. The only way to pursue the necessary ‘perestroika’
was to draw on the support of those outside the Party, in effect to
abandon the Communist Party’s long held monopoly of the truth.
A new,
reform minded leader, an attempt to save the system by a loosening of
economic and political control, tolerance of alternative opinions; the
parallels with Prague Spring were obvious. Husak’s regime was based on a
rejection of that previous effort to achieve ‘socialism with a human
face’; they had purged the reformers of 1968, and had clung onto power
through the intervening years of ‘normalisation’. The dynamic, new
leadership in the Soviet Union was in stark contrast to the aging
Czechoslovak apparatchiks. Their political careers had rested on
adherence to Moscow’s line, but how could they now join in criticisms of
the years of stagnation without implicating themselves? The comparison
was made explicit by a Soviet spokesman in 1987. When asked what the
difference between perestroika and Prague Spring was, he replied, “19
years.” Even more threatening to the Husak’s regime was Gorbachev’s
rejection of the Brezhnev doctrine. “The time is ripe for abandoning
views on foreign policy which are influenced by an imperial standpoint.
Neither the Soviet Union nor the USA is able to force its will on
others. It is possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but
only for a certain period. From the point of view of long term big time
politics, no one will be able to subordinate others. That is why only
one thing – relations of equality – remains. All of us must realise
this...This also obliges us to respect one another and everybody.” This was later summarised by Soviet
Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov as the Sinatra Doctrine,
each satellite was free to ‘Do it their way’. The threat of Soviet
intervention had been removed.
Another Charter 77 dissident,
Ludvik Vaculik was pessimistic about the reform
process,
“I observe all this in sceptical
suspense, as a socialist, and with some derision as a
Czech....True, that country has needed for a long time
for someone to come and shake it up, and yet it’s all
rather sad: by the time an idea has been grasped by the
Russian bureaucrat, it is hardly new where the rest of
the world is concerned. We saw this in cybernetics 40
years ago, later it was jazz, and now we are being
presented with the Moscow version of the 1968 Prague
Spring. Our people are understandably puzzled, asking
one another what’s in it for us. At the same time I
watch our government reluctantly giving us information
and trying to calm down expectations: don’t worry,
nothing as momentous as that is going to happen here.
After all, every country has the right to go its own
way, courageously declared (Government Minister) Bilak.
There you are then – after all these years we have
longed for a government that would not act as someone’s
arse-licker, and now we have got it! Is this not indeed
a historic moment?”
At the same time, the other pillar
of Husak’s regime, the fragile social contract with the workers, was
being eroded by economic decline. The widening gap between East and West
was impossible to hide in an age of improved communication, in which
Western television and radio could endlessly demonstrate the material
and cultural shortcomings of the Soviet Bloc. The generation reaching
adulthood in the 1980s born long after the War, had no memories of even
harder times, or of the Liberation, no framework within which the years
of Soviet domination could be construed as positive. As the economy
stalled, even the celebrated social mobility that characterised the
rapid industrialisation of early state socialism and that enabled
peasants’ and workers’ to access greater education and employment
opportunities had ground to a halt. Ambitious, younger employees found
promotional prospects blocked by older, long-serving political
appointees. Party membership declined throughout the region and the
numbers of those who genuinely believed in the parroted slogans of
Leninist purity dwindled.
The Velvet Revolution - 1989
Encouraged by the
fresh winds blowing from Moscow, increasing numbers of Czechs and
Slovaks were prepared to voice their opposition to the regime. Some,
such as the ‘Bratislava Aloud’ group, which in 1987 published a report criticising the government’s disregard for the environment, developed
from single issues. Other sources of opposition emerged from
non-communist student groups. Although Czechs and Slovaks in general are
less in thrall to organised religion than their counterparts in Poland,
the churches also grew bolder as centres of opposition; in 1988, rallies
demanding religious freedom were held in Prague and Bratislava. A
petition formulated by the Archbishop of Prague attracted 500,000
signatures.
Vaclav Havel was again arrested and imprisoned following his
participation in anti-government demonstrations marking the anniversary
of Jan Palach’s death. This heavy handed reaction provoked yet more
protests and Havel was released. Elsewhere in the region, Soviet control
was collapsing rapidly. Reform Communists in Hungary and Poland
attempted to reach compromises with their opponents.
In May 1989, the
border between Hungary and Austria was dismantled, allowing free travel.
In June, Solidarity won a share of power in free elections. In October
and November, mass demonstrations in East Germany culminated in the
dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
On November 17th, in Prague, an officially sanctioned
commemoration of Jan Opletal’s death at the hands
of the Nazis turned into yet another anti-government protest. The riot
police violently assaulted the protesters causing many injuries. Rumours
that a student had been killed lead to further outraged protests.
Throughout the country citizens poured onto the streets. Havel sought to
harness the strength of popular feeling, gathering like minded opponents
to form Civic Forum, an umbrella organisation which articulated the
people’s demands. The government struggled to respond to the gathering
strength of opposition and, ruthlessly purged of reformists, contained
no credible alternatives to the architects of normalisation. This legacy
of 1968 made it difficult for them to follow the lead of the Hungarian
and Polish Parties.
Another option, as attempted unsuccessfully
in Romania the following month, was to adopt the Chinese
Tiananmen Square example and order security forces to violently
suppress the opposition. In retrospect, it is tempting to view
the events of 1989 as inevitable but this threat of violence was
a real risk that each individual involved in a street
demonstration had to weigh up. In particular, the term “Velvet
Revolution” glosses over the bravery required by those who
openly confronted the state.
However, so rapidly was support evaporating
that even the loyalty of the police and military could no longer
be guaranteed. The Czechoslovak Revolution was to be peacefully
“velvet”. On the other hand, the rebels could only draw
encouragement from events in neighbouring countries. Emboldened
by the expanding possibilities, and legitimised by the masses of
people on the streets, Civic Forum and their Slovak
counterparts, People Against Violence, could demand ever greater
concessions from the government. On November 24th Husak’s
successor as President, Milos Jakes resigned. Huge crowds greeted Dubcek
and Havel as they appeared together in Prague. A General Strike on
November 27th showed that the revolution had spread beyond Prague,
beyond the intellectuals and students, to encompass the workers in a
national rejection of the regime. In the following days, the Party
renounced its right to a leading role and plans were made for free
elections. Before the end of the year that had begun with his arrest and
imprisonment, Vaclav Havel was elected as President of Czechoslovakia.
Romania
Romania’s experiences of Communism and of revolution
were in many ways unique. The dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, had succeeded
in maintaining a degree of independence from Moscow. His open admiration
for Tito and his willingness to criticise the Soviet led invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968 earned him praise from many western leaders. However, his rule descended into the worst excesses of Stalinism with
absolute power gathered in Ceausescu’s hands, a personality cult
relentlessly exaggerating his genius, megalomaniac construction
projects, and corruption backed up by the threat of violence from the Securitate
secret police. Within this system even the limited ability, evident in
other communist bloc countries, of party leaders to ensure adherence to
notions of legality and to moderate any one individual’s excesses were
absent.
Political survival in Romania depended on absolute
loyalty to Ceausescu. Romania’s revolution occurred later than those of
its neighbours, in December 1989, and was characterised by its violence.
Romania was also the only country in which the Communist leader was
executed. The first moves centred on the provincial town of Timisoara
where crowds gathered to protest against the persecution of a popular
local pastor.
Within days the unrest had spread to the capital,
Bucharest, where people at a rally addressed by Ceausescu, ostensibly to
demonstrate support for the regime, interrupted his speech with boos and
chants. Rioting followed, and over a thousand people died in fighting
with Securitate forces. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, fled by
helicopter but were arrested by soldiers and after a brief trial, shot.
A provisional government, the National Salvation Front, announced the
termination of the Communist Party’s leading role and promised to
oversee the transition to democracy. The background of many of these new
leaders as Communist Party members has led to claims that the Romanian
experience was more a coup d’etat than a genuine revolution. However,
Romania’s initially faltering steps towards democracy gathered pace and
in 2007 Romania acceded to the European Union.
Concluding analysis - External vs internal and
individuals vs masses
The difficulty facing the student seeking to explain
the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989 is how to evaluate the
relative importance of what historians often describe as internal and
external factors. Textbooks written with an international relations,
‘Cold War’ focus, inevitably emphasise the ending of Détente, the more
confrontational policies of the New Right leaders Reagan and Thatcher
and in particular the sea change that was brought about the arrival of
Gorbachev in 1985.
There is little doubt that the changed international
focus does much to explain the macro-historical features and in
particular the timing of the revolution. But the external factors do not
explain the micro-historical nature of the revolutions. To understand
the nature of each of the revolutions in 1989 and in particular, their
differences, as well as their more obvious similarities (why was the
transfer of power so painless in Poland but so violent in Romania?) we
need to understand the local history and characteristics of the
opposition groups which forced the collapse of the regimes in 1989. The
communist edifice was crumbling throughout the Eastern Bloc; this was a
result of the interplay of both external macro-historical factors and
internal micro-historical factors. But the fact that in some states the
crumbling edifice needed a concerted shove, whilst in others it was
merely a question of picking a route through the rubble, can only be
explained in terms of the local context.
What about the people? Padraic
Kenney and the social revolution
Padraic Kenney has argued that
are three common explanations for the collapse of communism in 1989. The
first and most common involves the role of Gorbachev. The second
concerns the deepening economic crisis. The third involves the role of
the dissident intellectuals like Havel and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia
and Kuron and KOR in Poland, what we have described as the
‘anti-political’ movement. 'But [he argues] if Soviet reform, economic collapse, and
dissent are each essential to grasping some part of the
complexity of 1989, they are together incomplete without
the story of the social movements of the 1980s... We
also don't know why 1989 looked and felt the way it did.
For example, a crowd newly and suddenly liberated should
be vengeful, even violent. It ought to show distaste for
compromise and (at the ballot box) be eager to endorse
quick fixes. Anyone familiar with Central Europe will
note these attitudes are common today; they were not so
in 1989. Instead, gentle, triumphant irony was the order
of the day. From the Solidarity election poster showing
Gary Cooper in High Noon brandishing a ballot, to the
Prague banner reading "Well, you've knocked communism
out of our heads, comrades . . . ," to the Hungarian
poster showing Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker
kissing, the sense of the ridiculous ameliorated the
gravity of the change. The people of Central Europe
preferred ironic protests to slogans promising
extermination of the communists (and there were such
voices). They accepted protest that was not only about
political and economic power, but about environmental
and other issues... To most observers, both inside and
outside Central Europe, the revolutions were completely
unexpected, in their pace and in their popular nature.
Participants in the grassroots activism were less
overwhelmed, as the style, mode, language, and goals of
society's mass participation in 1989 were an outgrowth
of what they had been enacting for several years. For
the most part, neither dissident leaders nor reform
communists sought to mobilize society (in strikes or
demonstrations); the new movements, in contrast, brought
the carnival to town. They created the framework, and
the language, of the revolutions. People voted, or
demonstrated, in part because they had learned how to do
so from these movements and accepted (for the moment)
their goals. As we pay attention to the carnival, we can
learn to think about 1989 without resorting to
"miracles," "people power," and "surprise." '
(p 12)
EH Carr on the role of the individual in history
Importance of the masses
‘as Lenin said: 'Politics
begin where the masses are; not where there are thousands, but where
there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.' Carlyle’s and
Lenin's millions were millions of individuals: there was nothing
impersonal about them. Discussions of this question sometimes confuse
anonymity with impersonality. People do not cease to be people or
individuals individuals, because we do not know their names. Mr Eliot's
' vast, impersonal forces' were the individuals whom Clarendon, a bolder
and franker conservative, calls 'dirty people of no name'. These
nameless millions were individuals acting more or less unconsciously,
together, and constituting a social force. The historian will not in
ordinary circumstances need to take cognizance of a single discontented
peasant or discontented village. But millions of discontented peasants
in thousands of villages are a factor which no historian will ignore…All
effective movements have few leaders and a multitude of followers; but
this does not mean that the multitude is not essential to their success.
Numbers count in history.’
Importance of the individual
'Even today I do
not know that we can better Hegel's classic description: The great man
of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell
his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart
and essence of his age; he actualizes his age …The great man is always
representative either of existing forces or of forces which he helps to
create by way of challenge to existing authority. But the higher degree
of creativity may perhaps be assigned to those great men who, like
Cromwell or Lenin, helped to mould the forces which carried them to
greatness, rather than to those who, like Napoleon or Bismarck, rode to
greatness on the back of already existing forces. …What seems to me
essential is to recognize in the great man an outstanding individual who
is at once a product and an agent of the historical process, at once the
representative and the creator of social forces which change the shape
of the world and the thoughts of men.'
