In 1989, a wave of popular revolutions transformed
Eastern and central Europe. Communism
was swept away. The Soviet Union withdrew.
Only ten years earlier the Warsaw Pact and Soviet
domination of central and Eastern Europe had still
looked solid and unshakeable. There were difficulties,
of course. Romania was showing signs of
nationalist independence; its communist leader
Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was much admired in the West,
which courted him assiduously much to its
later embarrassment. In Bulgaria, the German
Democratic Republic, Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
the communist regimes had proved
durable, though the last two countries had to be
brought into conformity with tanks and guns. For
two generations now the people of Eastern
Europe had known nothing but communism, and
those aged forty-five years and older had known
only different forms of authoritarian rule before
the Iron Curtain descended. The communist leaderships
had claimed that they had made great
social and economic advances; a golden future
beckoned; hardship and suffering were only temporary,
the means to greater virtue and prosperity.
One supposed virtue was that worker and
peasant solidarity had replaced destructive bourgeois
nationalism. The Soviet alliance, people
were told, guaranteed their protection from
German revanchism. This seemed to justify the
stationing of the Red Army in their countries.
Only the Romanians in 1958 succeeded in
ridding themselves of their unwelcome Soviet
guests. But all the Eastern-bloc national forces
relied mainly on Soviet weapons. The economic
exploitation of the satellites, a feature of the
Stalinist post-war years, had long ceased. Indeed,
the Soviet Union was now subsidising the East
European economies in the 1980s to a significant
extent, at some sacrifice to itself. Oil and raw
materials were supplied at less than world prices.
The goods manufactured in Eastern Europe,
moreover, were of a design and quality that for
the most part were unsaleable anywhere else
but in the Soviet Union. Of course the USSR,
because of its sheer size, dominated trading relationships.
It is also notoriously difficult to evaluate
the advantages and disadvantages of the
Soviet-led Council of Mutual Economic Assistance
(Comecon) on the basis of price calculations.
And if the Eastern Europeans had not
found a ready market for their goods and had to
find a market in the West, would that not have
made them more competitive? In the end they
found themselves linked to a collapsing Soviet
economy and, when that link was cut, faced economic
collapse themselves. Little reliance can be
placed on the statistics of economic ‘progress’
published by the regimes, although they were
carefully analysed by economic experts in the
West. In any event, they show a precipitous fall
from the 1970s to the end of the 1980s.
What can be measured is the increasing indebtedness
of Eastern Europe to the West. With the
reduction of East–West tension, loans had become
more readily available to accelerate the regimes’
plans to catch up with the West industrially.
These, too, failed. The heaviest burdened were
the East Germans, whose debt increased from
$1.4 billion in 1971 to $20.7 billion in 1988.
They were fortunate: their debts were assumed
by the Federal Republic. The Poles ($1.1 billion
debt in 1971) groaned under a debt of over $48.5
billion in 1991, and the Hungarians suffered from
massive foreign debts, the highest amount per
head. The only ‘virtuous’ country was Romania.
By draconian measures, which drove much of the
population below any tolerable living standard,
Ceaus¸escu had, by the time of his fall in 1990,
paid off his country’s debts, which totalled $10
billion in 1981. Neither he nor his family shared
the austerity he imposed on his countrymen: they
lacked nothing in the way of imported Western
luxuries. In this respect he was only an extreme
example of Eastern European communist leadership,
all of which did very well out of communism
and Soviet protection.
The corruption was obvious and open. But the
regimes also had a large privileged clientele who
benefited from their continuing in power. The
host of bureaucrats needed in the central planning
ministries, the officers in the army, the secret
police and the party, and trade union functionaries,
all had a vested interest in upholding the communist
state system. Now and then, at worst, one
leader might be replaced by another, but in the
1970s and 1980s there were remarkably few
changes in the upper reaches of the communist
leadership. Poland, in the wake of the Solidarity
crisis of 1979 to 1982, was something of an
exception. The election of a Polish cardinal, Karol
Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II in 1978 greatly
encouraged the Polish people in their resistance
to communism. His visit to Poland in 1983 after
the suppression of Solidarity prompted a massive
demonstration of resistance and independence.
But few foresaw the collapse of communist rule
in Eastern Europe much before it happened. The
impact of the year of revolution, 1989, was therefore
all the greater.
With hindsight it is possible to discern the roots
of that revolution, the discontent of the masses
that boiled over, and the reason why the communist
leaders were afraid to resort to bloody repression
– why, had they tried to do so, the forces
ready to do their bidding were no longer strong
enough. It was the mass of the people who rose
against the leadership. Not only intellectuals and
dissidents but hundreds of thousands of formerly
good communists turned on a system they had
previously supported. In the face of realities, of
oppression and of falling living standards, they
became utterly disillusioned. Once they realised
they were no longer a small group that could be
harried, beaten and imprisoned, the people began
to lose their fear of the state. Increasing contacts
with the West in the 1970s and 1980s rendered
the contrast in living standards even starker. What
fanned discontent, however, were not just poor
living standards and dwindling hopes of a better
future but the growing recognition that their leaders
and the whole communist system of repression
and economic management were the cause of
their troubles.
The new thinking stimulated by Gorbachev in
the Soviet Union spread to the smaller nations of
Eastern Europe with electrifying effect after 1987.
The communist leaderships could not adjust
themselves to realities. They remained cocooned,
brainwashed by their own ideology and propaganda.
There is no better illustration of this than
Ceaus¸escu’s last appearance on 22 December
1989, on the balcony of his palace, unable to
make himself heard over the catcalls of the crowd
gathered in the square below. The complete
bewilderment of a once all-powerful man, whose
only experience for years had been hero-worship
and the sound of sycophantic clapping in unison,
showed on his face in television pictures beamed
around the world. Even on the day the opposition
stood him and his hated wife Elena against
a wall to be shot, they were both convinced that
the people loved them. It was Christmas Day.
Absolute power not only corrupts, it also blinds.
Until the year of revolution, the communist
leaderships had felt sufficiently secure to assert a
measure of national independence from Soviet
economic and political control. To that extent,
the Gorbachev phenomenon was welcome. He
promised, in April 1985, a month after coming to
power, to accord full respect for the sovereignty of
the Eastern European nations that uphold ‘socialist
internationalism’. That sounded like a softer
version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, not a repudiation
of it. The regimes went on believing that the
communist state was safe and would, if the need
again arose, be defended by the Red Army, as it
had been in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in
1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. It dawned on
them only slowly, if ever, that Gorbachev was
ready to abandon them if that was the will of the
people.
By the time of the Twenty-Seventh Party
Congress in February and March 1986 Gorbachev
had moved on and was urging much more
radical political reform in the Soviet Union. By
September, he was telling the people of Krasnodar
that the ‘essence of perestroika . . . is for people to
feel they are the country’s master’. In 1987 and
1988 he reshaped Soviet foreign policy, determined
to win the support, trust and economic
help of the West. His new foreign minister,
Eduard Shevardnadze, gave him his enthusiastic
backing and put forward to the Central Committee
of the Soviet Communist Party in February
1990 an important reason for this revolution in
the Soviet Union’s policies: ‘It is only through
extensive international co-operation that we will
be able to solve our most acute domestic problems.’
Soviet-led repression in Eastern Europe
would irreparably harm the more important new
Soviet interests. Like other imperial powers, the
Soviet Union had reached the point where the
burdens of empire, and its negative effects on
Soviet relations with the rest of the world, far outweighed
the advantages. In the missile age, territorial
buffers no longer provided protection; the
‘military imperative’ of the immediate post-war
years had vanished too.
The prop that had held up national communist
regimes in Eastern Europe – the popular
belief that their communist leaders were at least
better than a Soviet occupation and direct Soviet
rule – had been knocked away. In 1989, the possibility
of Soviet intervention was no longer
feared. And without the Red Army behind them,
the national people’s armies of conscripts could
no longer be relied on to support the regimes
against their own people.
One by one the reasons for the revolutions
that swept through Eastern Europe in 1989
became clear. The nucleus of a dissident leadership
was somewhat uncertainly in place in
Hungary, Romania and East Germany; there was
a more entrenched one in Czechoslovakia, where
the Charter 77 group had a long history of
protest; and Solidarity in Poland was already a
power in its own right. Crucial also was the disillusionment
of the masses with the economic situation
and with the whole decaying system. The
leadership elite knew that it could no longer save
itself simply by changing the man at the top. The
revolt began with the young. The feeling, soon
all pervading, that the Iron Curtain was full of
holes, that it could no longer separate the angry
people from the centres of power in East Berlin,
Prague, Budapest or Sofia, any more than it could
prevent people in the East from contacting the
West, was intoxicating. On 9 November 1989,
the Berlin Wall, that potent Iron Curtain barrier,
fell before an onslaught of the people. It was as
symbolic an event as the fall of the Bastille.
The final rot had begun ten years earlier in the
Lenin Shipyard in Gdan´sk. The Solidarity movement
had spread until it had gained the support
of half of Poland’s adult population. With the
Gdan´ sk agreement concluded between the
Solidarity leaders and the government in 1980,
the stranglehold of the Polish Communist Party
appeared to be broken. The support for Solidarity
had a variety of roots; repeated economic failures
during thirty-five years of communist rule,
working-class and intellectual resistance to a
single-party authoritarian state, nationalism and
Catholic rejection of atheistic communism – these
together provided a fertile soil for the growth of
a broad opposition. Solidarity was a party in all
but name, and, in the year during which it was
allowed to function as a free trade union movement,
recruited 10 million members. The morale
of the Communist Party collapsed as communists
also switched to Solidarity.
As the economy slumped further, General
Jaruzelski became the new party leader and
declared martial law on 13 December 1981.
Fearing Soviet intervention, the conscript Polish
army obeyed him. There was some sullen relief,
but protest strikes also broke out, harshly suppressed
at the cost of a number of deaths and
injuries. With the Communist Party now a broken
reed, Jaruzelski formed the Military Council of
National Salvation. Solidarity was outlawed, hundreds
of its members were arrested, including for
a short time Lech WaΠe¸sa, and the rest of the leadership
was driven underground. Yet the attempt
to obliterate Solidarity proved a total failure. The
electrician WaΠe¸sa did not sink back into obscurity
but was internationally celebrated with the award
of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. The oversubsidised
command economy failed to respond
to economic medications applied by the communists,
and US economic sanctions and rejection by
the West isolated the regime until 1983. The
workforce was not to be inspired by military or
communist appeals to work harder. A particularly
shocking example of the brutality prevailing under
the regime was the abduction and murder by
the Interior Ministry’s security forces of a popular
radical priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, whose
church had become a focus for the opposition.
Gradually Jaruzelski relaxed military rule and
the majority of Solidarity activists were released
from jail. But attempts by Jaruzelski to improve
the economy by cutting subsidies provoked new
strikes in 1988. The people were not prepared to
accept such measures from a regime that kept
itself in power by force. The authorities knew that
national malaise and economic crisis could not be
overcome without the cooperation of the opposition.
And so in February 1989 began the
‘round-table talks’ between the military communist
regime and opposition groups, including
Solidarity. The constitutional reforms agreed by
April that year ended one-party rule. Solidarity
was permitted to emerge as a political party – that
was a far-reaching concession. Czechoslovakia
had been invaded in 1968 when Dubcˇek had conceded
as much. This time, Gorbachev had made
it clear that the Eastern European nations could
follow their own road of development.
The concession Solidarity made was that in the
lower house of the Polish parliament, the Sejm,
65 per cent of the seats would be reserved for
the Communist Party and only 35 per cent would
be contested. A senate was created as well, which
would be freely elected, and the Senate and the
Sejm together would elect a president. Solidarity
swept the board in the elections held in June
1989: of the 161 seats in the lower chamber that
they were able to contest, they and their nominees
won 160; in the Senate, they won 92 out
of 100 seats. It was a triumph for WaΠe¸sa. With
their 299 reserved seats, the communist coalition
partners still had a majority in the lower chamber.
When it came to the election of the president,
Jaruzelski made it by one vote, with some help
from WaΠe¸sa, who refused to stand against him
for fear that this would push the communists and
Moscow too far. The compromise was cemented
when, in August 1989, Jaruzelski appointed the
first non-communist premier, a Solidarity supporter
and close associate of WaΠe¸sa, Tadeusz
Mazowiecki; he, in turn, with an eye on Moscow,
formed a coalition government in which Solidarity
ministers formed the largest group but which allocated
the crucial ministries of Defence and the
Interior to two communists.
Because the leading role of the communists
had been removed by compromise and negotiation
in Poland, vestiges of entrenched communist
power, such as the free elections for only a part
of the lower chamber, survived until October
1991 when a ‘reserved’ communist majority was
no longer an option after the revolutions elsewhere
in Eastern Europe during 1989. Poland
was also the first communist nation to attempt to
transform itself from a planned to a Western-style
free-market economy. The new government
inherited a ruined economy with soaring inflation
and falling production. The finance minister,
Leszek Balcerowicz, inaugurated a harsh programme
to restore the value of the currency, cut
subsidies, deal with a huge foreign debt and make
industry competitive and productive once more.
The shops began to fill with stocks in 1990, but
at prices few could afford. Standards of living fell
more steeply than under the communists. The
Solidarity alliance grew weaker as the ‘common
enemy’ vanished, and WaΠe¸sa began attacking
Mazowiecki, blaming his government for the
hardships of economic reform because it was not
acting energetically and speedily enough.
In December 1990, the bewildered Poles came
to elect their new president, Jaruzelski’s term having
been shortened. A hitherto unknown Polish-
Canadian gained more votes than Mazowiecki,
and Lech WaΠe¸sa won easily. It would be more difficult
to deliver what he had promised. Western
aid was relatively small. Without the Soviet market,
much of Poland’s industry was uncompetitive.
With such poor business prospects, who would
buy shares in privatised industries? Polish shock
therapy did bring down inflation and saved the
value of the currency, but living standards fell.
The Mazowiecki government in 1990 boldly
set in motion policies to achieve a rapid transition
to a market economy. Privatisation took off with
almost half of all Poland’s employees working for
the private sector by 1992 and nearly all retail business
in private hands. There remained a large state
industrial sector that no one wanted to buy. In
1990 Poland suffered from soaring inflation of
almost 700 per cent, but in 1991 it fell back to a
more manageable 60 per cent. Even so, price rises
fuelled popular discontent because wages did not
keep pace. Unemployment meanwhile exceeded
11 per cent of the workforce and in 1992 was still
rising. The Polish disenchantment with democratic
politicians was clearly in evidence when at the general
election held in October 1991 less than half
the Poles bothered to vote at all and those who did
returned twenty different parties to the Sejm with
none receiving more than 12 per cent of the vote.
The unity Solidarity had enjoyed in opposition did
not last long after its victory over communism. The
shock therapy of economic reform, applauded by
the West, which finally helped to reduce Poland’s
debt burden, turned the Polish people’s enthusiasm
for post-communist freedom into disillusionment.
The transition to capitalism was proving
hard, even though Poland had started early. By
1993 the Polish economy at last showed signs of
recovery with output rising. Nearly half of the
GDP was produced by the private sector. Poland
was even being governed by its first woman prime
minister Hanna Suchoka. In the face of political
instability Poland made steady progress restructuring
its economy. The steep fall in output from
1989 to 1991 began to be reversed in 1992.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary
joined NATO in March 1999 (Yeltsin finally
dropped his objections after meeting Clinton in
Helsinki the previous March). Clinton offered
some concessions: no nuclear weapons would be
stationed in the countries of new entrants and the
US would cut its forces in Europe by two-thirds
to about 100,000; NATO weapons were already
below the limits of the Treaty on Conventional
Forces in Europe, and no longer posed a threat
to Russia. Though Russia was not invited to join
the alliance, a Russian–NATO partnership council
was established. Just a few years earlier such
developments would have been unimaginable.
Nevertheless, despite all attempts to disguise the
fact, NATO remained an insurance against any
future Russian belligerency. NATO has also
evolved a rapid reaction force in order to police
conflicts such as the war in Bosnia – provided
member countries are willing to use it.
Poland is by far the most important of the
central European countries, with a population of
some 39 million. As in other ex-communist countries,
politics have taken an unexpected turn.
In the September 1993 elections Aleksander
Kwasniewski leader of the Democratic Left
Alliance, the reorganised Polish Communist
United Workers Party, became prime minister in a
coalition with the Polish Peasant Party. Although
the ex-communists, in their four years in power,
have not shown such enthusiasm for drastic market
reform as the previous Solidarity coalitions,
they have nevertheless continued to make selective
changes. Another ex-communist, Wlodzimierz
Cimoszewizs, followed as prime minister, but no
traces were left of the old communism; the Polish
leaders had become technocrats, following not
the bankrupt Russian model but the leading light
of Washington. The government sought to
restrict state spending in order to encourage the
private sector. With an excellent growth rate and
increasing foreign investment, Poland’s economic
performance has been the best in Eastern and central
Europe, though high inflation remained a
problem in 1996. Solidarity had become wary of
the market reforms: the closing of the Gdan´sk
shipyard, where the party was born, was a particularly
bitter blow. A disparate opposition was
welded together by a Solidarity leader, Marian
Krzaklewski, into the Solidarity Electoral Action
(AWS) and emerged from the elections of
September 1997 as the single biggest party, with
33.8 per cent of the vote. The ruling Democratic
Left Alliance also increased their support to 27.1
per cent of the vote but the coalition partners, the
Peasant Party, which had gained little from market
reform, lost heavily. The new AWS, which included
elements of the anti-communist right and
the religious party, formed an uneasy coalition
with the Freedom Union, which is both secular
and keenly free-market. Krzaklewski and the compromise
prime minister of the coalition will find it
hard to keep a government composed of so many
diverse elements on a reformist track.
In the mid-1990s Poland had forged ahead,
earning the title of central European tiger. The
pace markedly slowed as the century drew to a
close exposing more starkly the problems Poland
was still confronting, a health service badly
strained, the need for better schools and the infrastructure
of roads and railways. With the world
economy in slow growth and especially the
Germans in the doldrums, the new millennium
has been a grimmer time, foreign investment
trailed off. What has been remarkable about Polish
politics is their broad consensus. The main parties
are rooted in Poland’s communist past, the AWS
and Freedom Union grew out of Solidarity and
Democratic Left Alliance out of the communist
Polish United Workers Party. Both adopted pragmatic
policies differing mainly in emphasis –
agreed on democracy, a pro-Western alignment,
desiring US involvement in Europe and support
for Poland, in favour of joining the European
Union, a market economy, though Democratic
Left Alliance aims at a more gradual pace less
harsh in its effect on the people. Since joining the
European Union on 1 May 2004 Poland’s economy,
after three years of little progress, sharply
increased. Farm subsidies and higher agricultural
prices were a stimulus but prices for consumers
also increased and unemployment remained a
problem. On the political scene the reeling socialist
party split, Leszek Miller resigned and Marek
Belka in May became prime minister heading a
minority government which struggles on in the
absence of a stable coalition.
Kádár’s regime in Hungary had since the late
1960s placed economic reforms, rising living standards,
more choice and greater freedoms in the
forefront of its policies. The softer image of
the Communist Party, whose leading role could
not be challenged, reconciled the majority of the
people to the limited options it permitted. Kádár
projected himself as the leader who knew how far
he could go without risking a repeat of the Soviet
invasion of 1956. The 1968 New Economic
Mechanism, as the mixture of central planning and
market-oriented policies was called, seemed to
work for a while. Four years later, there was some
backtracking to a planned economy. Goulash
communism was kept going by increasingly heavy
foreign credits – and so debts. By the mid-1980s,
Hungary’s economy was showing every sign of
sickness. Kádár’s reforms were too cautious.
Communist Party dominance of economic planning
blocked any genuine market-oriented course.
Kádár at heart was a communist who wanted to
make communism work, not a pragmatic market
economist or a believer in democracy. Even so,
communist power dragged on.
In May 1988, the party itself got rid of Kádár,
and the reformist communist prime minister
Károly Grósz replaced him. Grósz banked on a
more efficient authoritarian communist system to
pull Hungary out of its economic stagnation. But,
for an opposition within the party led by Imre
Pozsgay, this did not constitute any real break
with Kádárism. Pozsgay raised the ghost of Imre
Nagy, who, he declared, had not led a counterrevolution
but had put himself at the head of a
national uprising. The issue involved a repudiation
of Kádár’s claim to legitimacy and to the party’s
claim that Nagy had been wrong to espouse a
multi-party political system. In June 1988, the
remains of Nagy were reinterred with honour.
Henceforth the Communist Party was deeply
divided between reformers and conservatives.
The opposition parties were equally split between
the liberal, urban and intellectually led Alliance
of Free Democrats and the populist Hungarian
Democratic Forum, which claimed to defend
the ordinary man and the small farmers and peasants
of the countryside. As in Poland, where antiintellectual
and anti-Semitic sentiments during the
presidential election were used to discredit
Mazowiecki (he was ‘smeared’ as being of Jewish
descent, though he was not), so the Democratic
Forum denigrated the Alliance of Free Democrats
for its supposedly intellectual ‘Jewish’ influences
(anti-Semitism has remained a flourishing evil in
Eastern Europe). When the free elections were
held in March 1990, the communists – now calling
themselves the Hungarian Socialist Party – suffered
a humiliating defeat, which also sealed the fate of
Pozsgay. Thus in Hungary as in Poland, there was
a peaceful end to communist rule and a transfer to
a Democratic Forum government in May. The
prime minister, Forum’s leader Jozsef Antall,
stressed that he would follow a gradual route to a
market economy. But Hungarian nationalism was
reviving, which threatened to isolate Hungary and
exacerbate the problems with its neighbours,
Slovakia with 600,000 ethnic Hungarians, Serbia
with 150,000 and Romania with 1.8 million. In
1993 moderation prevailed and neo-fascist appeals
for Lebensraum were being rejected; prosperity
came before conflict.
Hungary also experienced difficult years in the
mid-1990s. Inflation and unemployment were
high, relations with Slovakia strained after suggestions
from the Slovak leader, Vladimír Mecˇiar,
that the Hungarians in his country should be
forced to return to Hungary and the Slovakians
in Hungary repatriated to their homeland. With
other neighbours, however, good relations have
been established and Hungary has avoided
involvement in the destructive ethnic disputes in
the Balkans. Hungary has the most consistently
strong economy in Eastern Europe. Its accession
to the European Union on 1 May 2004 will
strengthen it further. Politically Hungary has
become a stable democracy with the electorate
polarised between the two major parties. The
socialist MSzP won the 1994 election and Victor
Orbán, more nationalist Fidesz Civic Party won
the election in 1998 only to lose to the socialists
in 2002. Undermined by scandals, Fidesz looks
to win the elections of 2006. The major parties
each head coalitions. As a member of NATO
(2003) and the EU, Hungary takes pride in a
strong sense of national identity and opposes the
federalist trends of the Union.
The Czech and Slovak peoples had to acquiesce
in Husák’s rule after 1968, with the Red Army
troops stationed in Czechoslovakia ready to back
it. Stability brought a measure of economic
improvement in the 1970s and for a time rising
standards of living, but by the 1980s the Czech
economy was in deep crisis. As was the case
throughout Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was
relying on increasingly outdated factories and
methods of production. Once, in previous years,
Czechoslovakia had been a model of economic
progress in Eastern Europe, comparable to
Western countries; now it had been turned into
a characteristic Soviet-bloc economy – stagnant,
with an over-emphasis on heavy industry, and so
unmindful of the environment that industry was
creating in parts of the country an ecological disaster,
rendering the air so polluted that it made
the population sick.
But Czechoslovakia had one positive aspect in
common with its heavy-handed Soviet mentor: an
immensely lively and distinguished group of dissident
writers and intellectuals. Their courageous
spokesman was a playwright, Václav Havel. The
Helsinki Agreements, promising human rights,
provided the dissidents with a unifying programme
with which to attack the communist
regime. In January 1977 they formed the Charter
77 movement, whose manifesto demanded respect
for human rights. Its leaders, who met
informally in each other’s houses, were arrested,
harassed and imprisoned for anti-state activities.
But their protests reached a wide audience in the
West and kept the spark of resistance alive in
Czechoslovakia.
As the 1980s drew to a close, Husák could not
isolate Czechoslovakia from the stirrings of
freedom in Poland and Hungary or from the
reformist impact of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’.
The old reactionary communist stance had had its
day. But Husák did not give up. He resigned
from the leadership of the party in December
1987 only to hand it to another hardline communist,
Milos Jakesˇ, while he himself retained the
presidency. In 1988 and during the early months
of 1989, Czechoslovakia seemed still to be firmly
in the communist grip, out of tune with all the
other East European states except Romania which
remained obedient to Ceausˇescu’s dictatorship.
But the Czech communist leadership felt ill at
ease and began to make a number of concessions.
Thereafter the collapse of communist rule was
both sudden and unexpected. On 17 November
1989 there was a large student demonstration in
Prague joined by thousands of people. The brutality
of the police attempts to suppress it, which
caused many injuries, provoked increasingly large
mass protests. Meanwhile, under Havel’s leadership,
opposition groups, with Charter 77 members
at their core, began to organise themselves
as the Civic Forum opposition. Their aim was
the overthrow of the communist regime. An
emotional open-air meeting was addressed by
Alexander Dubcˇek in Prague. In the end the
workers’ decision to join a national strike brought
down the government. Jakesˇ resigned with his
ministers. The Velvet Revolution was completed
without violence only a month later when Havel
on 29 December 1989 was elected president.
High on the agenda for Havel and the government
elected in June 1990 was how to deal
humanely with the problems of creating an efficient
market economy, and with the nationality
problem that had beset the state from its birth,
the relationship between Slovaks and Czechs. The
Czech Republic should have found it easier to
shrug off communism and embrace a market
economy: unlike its neighbours it had enjoyed
democratic rule before the Second World War.
The Czechs had also the capacity for innovative
industrial skills. However, the rapid privatisation
programme, which sought to bring about a wide
distribution of shares in state industries, ran into
difficulties here just as it did elsewhere in excommunist
Europe. The shares were bought up
by investment trusts which in turn were run by
the banks, many of them state owned. This meant
that the liberalised economy lacked many of the
disciplines and benefits of the market. Despite a
financial crisis, the ruling coalition of conservative
Prime Minister Václav Klaus struggled on until he
was ousted in November 1997; the economy
resumed its slow rate of growth.
Slovakia was particularly hard hit since most of
the heavy industry was located there. Separate
reformist parties, the Civic Forum and the Slovak
Public Against Violence, gained a clear majority
in the multi-party federal election held in June
1990. The Communist Party survived with a
large decline in support. The dominant issue in
1991 became whether the country would split.
Slovakia, which had most to fear from a rapid
move to a market economy, turned to a new
leader Vladimír Mecˇiar, who founded a nationalist
party. By the close of 1992, a bloodless separation
of the Czech Republic and Slovakia had
been agreed.
Slovakia’s flawed democracy was treated with
suspicion by the West. From 1993 to 1998 populist
Prime Minister Mecˇiar had dominated
Slovak politics as leader of the Movement for
Democratic Slovakia. An opposition began to
coalesce, the Slovak Democratic Coalition, and
ousted Mecˇiar after the September 1998 election.
During the next four years the Western-orientated
conservative–centre coalition, pro free market and
democratic, made it its aim to join NATO and the
European Union. The economy began to improve,
but the strength of Mecˇiar opposition – his party
was still the strongest single party in parliament –
held out the prospect that he would return to
power. His weakness was that no other party
would join him in a coalition. His star was fading.
The candidate put up by the Slovak Democratic
Coalition, Robert Schuster, beat Mecˇiar in the
presidential election in 1999.
Romania’s revolution of 1989 was both the
bloodiest and the most enigmatic in its outcome.
Two communist leaders dominated Romania’s
post-war history, Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej from
1945 to his death in 1965, and his successor
Nicolae Ceaus¸escu from 1965 until his ignominious
end, shot with his wife beside him against a
wall. The savagery of the Romanian revolution
was a reaction to the harshly repressive rule of
his closing years. Both Gheorghiu-Dej and
Ceaus¸escu were driven by a ruthless nationalism
to make Romania independent of the Soviet
Union, and to make it strong. They followed the
classic Stalinist route of emphasis on the crash
development of heavy industry and, under
Ceaus¸escu, this was done without any regard to
the cost of the people’s standard of living.
Gheorghiu-Dej succeeded in persuading the
Kremlin to withdraw the Red Army from Romanian
soil in 1958, and thereafter his country was a
nominal member of the Warsaw Pact rather than
a loyal, subservient ally. In the Kremlin the
Romanians’ uncomfortable stance was accepted,
because there was never any doubt about their
communist credentials.
Ceaus¸escu succeeded Gheorghiu-Dej after his
death in 1965. He eliminated all his political
rivals, courted mass popularity by playing the
anti-Soviet card and during his early years manipulated
public attitudes by permitting considerable
cultural freedom. He also followed an independent
foreign policy, allowing openings to the West.
Admiration for the ‘strong leader’ and fear of
Soviet intervention buttressed his support at
home. It also earned him far too uncritical
support in the West – knighted in Britain, he was
host to President Nixon in Bucharest in 1969. In
1983, Vice-President George Bush was sufficiently
misled to describe him as ‘one of Europe’s
good communists’. The Cold War blinkered
sound judgement.
During the 1970s Western credits helped him
to pursue his vision of turning Romania into a
modern industrial nation, but in the 1980s his
grandiose economic plans ended in disaster.
There was no new investment, as the dictator
squeezed everything productive for export to
repay the international debts. He was not willing
to be dependent on Western creditors either.
With his wife Elena, Ceaus¸escu in the end lost all
touch with reality and built up a personality cult
without parallel. His family exploited and pillaged
Romania’s scant resources for their own luxurious
lifestyles. They lived like potentates. Among his
final acts of economic madness was his urbanisation
programme, which would have involved
simply bulldozing half of Romania’s villages and
building soulless blocks of flats in their place. A
beginning was made, and at last the West was
shocked.
The secret police, the Securitate, made sure
that any opposition from the cowed people was
extinguished; in Romania even the Church
leaders made their own peace with the regime.
For Ceaus¸escu the right path to follow during the
years of communism’s crisis at the end of the
1980s was that of the Chinese leadership in
Tiananmen Square, not the Kremlin’s glasnost
and perestroika. Until the outbreak of the spontaneous
revolution in December 1989, Romania
appeared to be as securely in the grip of its leader
as Albania. Wishing to stand well with the West,
Ceaus¸escu’s solution for the small, brave intellectual
opposition was to force them to leave the
country. In the 1980s the Securitate behaved
more ruthlessly against lesser-known critics of the
regime; an unknown number were murdered.
A curtain-raiser for the revolution two years
later was the 1987 revolt by the workers of
Kronstadt. Some 5,000 stormed the party headquarters
and shouted ‘Down with Ceaus¸escu!’
Their lives had become intolerable. The Securitate
put down the rebellion with murderous brutality.
Just a few brave individuals continued to protest
and demonstrate. Among them was Pastor Laszlo
Tokes in Timis¸oara, who looked after his Hungarian
ethnic flock. Timis¸oara lay in a region in western
Romania that had been part of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire before 1918; since then it
had remained in Romania. The Securitate harassed
the pastor, and his bishop, under state pressure,
ordered his removal to another parish. On 15
December 1989, his congregation, Hungarians
and Romanians, surrounded his house to protect
him and his family from deportation. Once again,
as so often in history, this particular dissent, small
and apparently inconsequential, was the spark that
started a revolution. The protest spread to the
mixed Romanian and Hungarian population of
Timis¸oara. On 17 December 1989, the army
moved in. Bloody clashes ensued, and the unequal
fight soon ended with many dead. The news
spread through Romania and the world. Ceaus¸escu
was losing control.
On 21 December Ceaus¸escu arranged for the
usual adulation to greet him when he addressed
a crowd of 100,000 in Bucharest’s University
Square from the balcony of the Communist Party
Central Committee Building. Well-rehearsed
expressions of approval arose from the front of
the crowd, but from behind followed catcalls and
shouts of ‘Murderers of Timis¸oara!’ Ceaus¸escu,
bewildered, was hustled back into the building
and Romanian television interrupted its broadcast.
It was the signal people had been waiting
for: in the afternoon and evening they poured
into the streets. Securitate and army units started
firing indiscriminately at them, killing and
wounding many. Defiantly, the crowds gathered
again in University Square on 22 December and
were ready to storm the Central Committee
Building. They sensed that the army was now
with them and that only isolated fanatics of the
Securitate were still resisting the overthrow of
Ceaus¸escu. That morning the Ceaus¸escus finally
fled from the roof of the building by helicopter,
a journey that ended with their summary trial and
execution on Christmas Day.
A Council of the Front for National Salvation
was formed, and Ion Iliescu, once Ceaus¸escu’s
secretary for ideological issues, was chosen by
them as president. There was no democratic tradition
in Romania. The National Salvation Front
was dominated by reformist communists, who
disingenuously denied that they were bringing
forth the Communist Party in a new guise. Iliescu
won working-class support with concessions on
wages, and living conditions were rapidly
improved. He wanted to avoid plunging Romania
into hardship by trying to produce a Westernstyle
market-oriented economy. He also emphasised
Romanian nationalism, especially by means
of the ‘Romanisation’ of Transylvania, whose
population was now evenly divided between
ethnic Hungarians and Romanians. The region
had been part of Hungary until 1918; it was then
handed to Romania, returned to Hungary by
Hitler in 1940 and then given back to Romania
by the Allies in 1945 – a football of international
diplomacy, which had shown little concern for the
protection of the minorities involved.
In May 1990, Iliescu won an overwhelming
victory in the presidential elections and the
National Salvation Front was no less triumphant
in the parliamentary elections. In June, claiming
that the Front was in danger, Iliescu let some
20,000 communist miners, who had been transported
to Bucharest, loose on the democratic
opposition, and they beat up civilians indiscriminately
‘to restore order’. Violence also marked
dealings with the democratic opposition of the
Hungarian Democratic Union Party. Beset by
ethnic hatreds, by discrimination against minorities
and by the mob’s knee-jerk hostility to foreigners,
Hungarians and Jews, the political future
of Romania, a country that has never known
democracy, looked bleak. The terrible legacy of
Ceaus¸escu’s rule, including the neglected orphans
with AIDS and the shattered economy, remained
a heavy burden. The intimidation of the opposition
during and after the election in May, and the
violence of the miners brought to Bucharest in
June 1990, revealed the true colours of the
National Salvation Front. A rapid drive towards a
market economy was launched by Prime Minister
Petre Roman. The consequences were dire –
falling production and soaring unemployment
and President Iliescu dismissed Roman. In the
early 1990s Romania retained links with its communist
past; President Iliescu therefore continued
to enjoy support. But there have been economic
reforms, though at a much slower pace than in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The fall in
output continued even in 1992 to about half the
level of 1989. In these dire conditions the people
fear radical remedies and cling to some of the oldguard
leadership.
Romania continued to be ruled by excommunists
who brought the country close to
bankruptcy in spite of oil revenues and its rich
farming land. They were ousted only in November
1996 with the election of President Emil Constantinescu.
Romania then looked to the West and,
with the help of the International Monetary
Fund, made a painful start on the road to a market
economy.
For most of the post-war years, from 1954 to
1989, Todor Zhivkov led the Bulgarian Communist
Party as a kind of feudal boss, ruling the
country with the assistance of feudal regional
bosses in what was industrially the most backward
of the Eastern European nations, excepting only
Albania. Bulgaria was distinctive too in that it traditionally
looked to Russia as its friend. So there
was none of the nationalist agitation against the
Soviet Union common elsewhere in Eastern
Europe. That hatred was reserved for its Turkish
neighbour, Bulgaria’s bitter foe since the days of
the Ottomans.
Zhivkov was as odious a dictator as any, his
repressive machinery of state claiming thousands
of victims. Prodded by the Kremlin, he proposed
reforms in 1987, but nothing came of them.
Instead, to bolster his popularity, he turned on
the Turkish minority in the summer of 1989.
Violent repression of Turkish demonstrations led
to a mass exodus of the Turks from Bulgaria into
Turkey and badly tarnished Zhivkov’s standing
both in the West and in the Kremlin. The democratic
opposition groups had only recently been
formed, so they were too weak to topple him.
The job was done by reformist communists from
within: in November 1989 Zhivkov, to his astonishment,
was dismissed by the Politburo. The
reformers won, and in June 1990, in a free election,
the communists, now called the Bulgarian
Socialist Party, gained a substantial victory over
the Western-oriented Union of Democratic
Forces, though achieving only a small overall
majority of eleven in the 400-member parliament.
Anti-Turkish nationalism and fear of the consequences
of introducing Western capitalism had
swayed the voters. In August 1990, the urban
opposition in Sofia turned to violent demonstration,
but in the circumstances the response of the
ruling communists in the Bulgarian Socialist Party
was moderate. With the direct election as president
of the incumbent Zheliu Zhelev in January
1992, it was to be hoped that Bulgaria was entering
a more stable period. Much of the communist
bureaucracy remained in place and economic
reform was only halfhearted at best. Not surprisingly
foreign investment was slow to appear, and
inflation in 1991 reached 600 per cent, but by
adopting IMF-designed remedies it fell to 80 per
cent in 1992. With Romania, Bulgaria also suffered
severely, its output falling to a little over 60
per cent of that in 1987.
Communist rule lasted the longest where Soviet
domination ceased decades ago. Enver Hoxha,
fervent Stalinist admirer, was fortunate to die in
1985 before the wave of revolution. In Albania,
the revolution was delayed. Not until 1991 were
statues of the great leader Enver toppled by angry
students. That there were students at all, a university
and a high degree of literacy was one of the
few positive results of Hoxha’s forty-year rule. For
Albania was the most backward and the poorest
country in Europe. Hoxha, Stalinist and repressive,
broke with the post-Stalin Soviet Union in
the 1960s and with the reformist phase of Chinese
communism in the late 1970s. The intense
nationalism of his regime and the successful assertion
of independence from powerful neighbours,
especially Yugoslavia contributed to the popular
support he enjoyed during his years in power. His
successor, Ramiz Alia, was also a convinced communist
but was attempting to adjust Albania to
the changing, more liberal climate of Eastern
Europe. He was also leading it out of self-imposed
isolation. He remained as one of the undiluted
communist survivors of the post-revolutionary
years. The West, although accustomed to viewing
poverty in the Third World, was deeply shocked
by the conditions still existing in Albania. Yet
refugees trying to flee in boats to Italy were turned
back. An Italian relief operation codenamed
Pelican launched during the winter of 1991,
alone, saved Albanians from widespread starvation.
The communists were not ousted until
1992 when Sali Berisla was elected the first noncommunist
president. For the ordinary Albanian
the prospects in the 1990s remained grim. In
1997 order was once more restored when an
Italian peacekeeping force organised elections.
Bloodshed, war and ethnic strife in Eastern
Europe reached heights in what was formerly
Yugoslavia that exceeded anything witnessed elsewhere,
including the Soviet Union. The Western
powers and the United Nations sought to
mediate, but Serbs, Croats and Muslims – while
endlessly talking and concluding ceasefire agreements
– went on bloodily fighting each other.
The memory of the bitter struggle between Serbs
and those Croats who had supported the fascist
puppet regime in Croatia during the Second
World War was revived. Tito’s legacy of a federal
state held together by the Communist Party disintegrated
with disastrous effect. But after his
death in 1980 even his huge prestige and the
power of the Communist Party apparatus could
not overcome the weakening of the centre. Local
party bosses, cultural differences and gross economic
discrepancies between comparatively
prosperous Slovenia and the poverty of parts of
Serbia hastened the separation of the republics.
Successive constitutions sought to avoid violent
nationality clashes by conceding more power to
the communist leadership and its apparatus in
each republic. Yugoslavia was open to the West.
Indeed, tourism became the most important
hard-currency earner with the start of mass air
travel in the 1960s. By the 1980s, the Yugoslav
economy was in a mess and reached levels of
hyperinflation similar to the worst in Latin
America. In 1990 the federal prime minister’s
currency reform and economic measures restored
financial stability but at the cost of hardship and
unemployment which exacerbated the conflict
between the nationalities.
The conflict had become very evident in 1987
when the Communist Party of the most powerful
republic, Serbia, was taken over by Slobodan
Milosˇevic´. He gained momentum and popularity
by fanning Serbian national fervour. An issue was
immediately at hand: the problem presented by
the province of Kosovo, one of the poorest
regions in the whole country, peopled by a majority
of Albanians, but with a large Serbian minority.
The proportion of Albanians, with their much
higher birth rate, would increase further in any
case, but this process was hastened by the mass
emigration of Serbians. Without real evidence,
Milosˇevic´ claimed that this was the result of
Albanian terrorism. Albanian protest against
Serbian repression led to uprisings, demonstrations
and bloody conflict. More serious still was
the struggle between a revived Croatian nationalism
and Serbia.
Serbia sought to dominate the other republics;
Croatian nationalism not only resisted Serbian
pretensions but had its own designs on the ethnically
mixed population of the republic of Bosnia
and Herzogovina, while the Serbs in Croatia were
protesting against the discrimination practised
against them. The Slovenes not only wanted
to rid themselves of all communist control but
also desired virtual independence. Free elections
fatally weakened not only the communists,
however much they attempted to distance themselves
from the past by renaming their party, but
also the federal union.
By comparison with their Eastern European
neighbours, the Germans living in the now
defunct German Democratic Republic appeared
to be the lucky ones. They were not simply cast
adrift, like those neighbours, cut off from the
Soviet Union, having to struggle to transform
their countries largely by their own efforts, with
relatively little Western help. The Germans in the
East were united with the most prosperous
country in Europe, their fellow Germans in the
West. Both lots of Germans had greeted with
jubilation the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on
9 November 1989.
The DDR economy was the most advanced of
all the economies in Eastern Europe. With help
and investment from the Federal Republic it was
expected it would be brought up to Western
standards after reunification. The costs of all this,
no doubt high temporarily, could be met by
increased state borrowing and then repaid from
the growth of the German economy as a whole.
Just as the Federal Republic was reaching an economic
plateau, here was the chance of another
Wirtschaftswunder, a happy combination of a
moral victory and an economic opportunity. But
it all went sour as quickly as the unexpected unification
of Germany had been accomplished.
As 1989 began no one in Europe or the rest
of the world anticipated a cataclysmic change.
Erich Honecker, the DDR head of state, lauded
the ‘scarcely conceivable’ achievements of the
‘first socialist state of workers and peasants on
German soil’. The dour and dedicated communist
Walter Ulbricht was forced in May 1971
to step down as party secretary, probably on
Moscow’s instructions, and was replaced by Erich
Honecker. It was Ulbricht who had ordered the
Berlin Wall to be built in August 1961 to stem
the haemorrhage of the ‘workers’ and ‘peasants’
crossing to freedom and a better life in the West.
He had also ruthlessly built up East German manufacturing
in heavy industry and chemicals,
regardless of the ecological cost. The attempt to
make the DDR an industrial and independent
communist showpiece fell apart under Honecker
in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the advantages
of a privileged relationship with the European
Community: trade between the two Germanies
counted as internal EEC trade, a concession to
the Federal Republic which offered automatic
West German citizenship to any DDR citizen who
wanted it and could get to the West.
It is quite possible that Honecker actually
believed all the false statistics put out by his government
showing how well things were going.
They were certainly going well enough for him and
the communist elite, living in the lap of luxury and
owning extravagantly appointed holiday villas on
land on which ordinary mortals were not allowed
to set foot. Control over the people was exercised
by the Stasi, the 85,000-strong security police who
relied on denunciations to alert them to dissident
comrades. As in National Socialist Germany, there
was no shortage of friends and neighbours, teachers
and managers, who were ready to spy and to
report wrong attitudes to the state authorities. The
bulging files of the Stasi are now among the most
embarrassing legacies of the DDR.
During the spring and summer of 1989,
Honecker resisted all pressures for reform, despite
the radical changes taking place among two of the
DDR’s neighbours, Poland and Hungary. In the
Kremlin, too, Gorbachev had shown that there
was no alternative to reform, to respect for human
rights and to the removal of the corrupt and stultifying
party apparatchiks. The DDR Politburo
did not welcome this, but the hardline comrades
could take heart from the firmness the Czech
leadership was showing. And if demonstrations
looked like getting out of hand, the Chinese
showed that summer how best to deal with them.
Honecker even despatched his protégé, Egon
Krenz, to Beijing to congratulate the Chinese
leadership on its bloody handling of the students
in Tiananmen Square. Bankrupt Albania was
another stout ally. Honecker, by now totally out
of touch, was looking forward to celebrating the
fortieth anniversary of the founding of the DDR.
So far the West Germans had done little to
encourage ideas of fundamental change in the
relationship between the two Germanies. Chancellor
Kohl, whose popularity had fallen very low,
seemed clumsy and out of depth. Within his coalition
government there were tensions with the
Free Democratic Party and with the astute foreign
minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who since 1987
had advocated a more flexible policy towards the
Soviet Union. The moments of pivotal change in
the triangular relationship of East and West
Germany and the USSR can be dated with some
precision. The Achilles heel of the Soviet Union’s
dominance was its own collapsing economy.
Gorbachev badly needed Western help, especially
West German help. When he arrived in Bonn to
a rapturous welcome from the crowds in June
1989, he really came as a supplicant for economic
assistance. The price was freedom for the Germans
in the DDR. Gorbachev and Kohl signed an
accord pledging them to work to end the division
of Europe, to respect human rights and to
expand economic and cultural cooperation.
Gorbachev’s spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov
quipped that, for the people of the DDR, ‘there
was the Brezhnev Doctrine. Now we have the
Frank Sinatra Doctrine – let them do it their way.’
They very soon did.
The East German regime had to watch with
bewilderment the flood of DDR ‘tourists’ who
travelled to neighbouring Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and Poland and then camped there in the
West German embassies waiting to leave for the
West. A trickle turned into a flood. During August
and September 1989 tens of thousands left and the
Hungarians opened the border to Austria. The
Hungarians, heavily in debt to the West, were
more anxious to please prosperous West Germany
than the bankrupt East. On 7 October, the
anniversary celebrations were held in East Berlin.
Gorbachev planted a Judas kiss on 77-year-old
Honecker’s cheek. It was the last occasion when
regimented loyalists waved their flags and cheered
their leader. In the backstreets, riot police were
trying to keep the protesters in check. Soon,
Honecker was urging that the police and army
should open fire on the demonstrators who were
gathering in East Germany’s principal cities –
East Berlin, Dresden and above all in Leipzig. This
decided leading communists in the Politburo to
organise a coup, with the Kremlin’s secret
approval. On 18 October 1989, Egon Krenz toppled
and replaced an astonished Honecker. But,
with his wolfish look and smile, Krenz could not
quell the spirit of revolt. On 9 November 1989 he
ordered that the Berlin Wall should be opened.
The Protestant Church in East Germany had
played an honourable and courageous role in
forming an opposition grouping. It called itself
New Forum, a coalition of clergymen, artists,
socialists and ordinary men and women who
wanted to bring to an end the repression. Soon,
hundreds of thousands, many among them
former communists, took to the streets to
demonstrate. The call for the gang of communist
leaders to go was almost universal. Hundreds of
thousands wanted to live and move in freedom,
to change their drab lives. The El Dorado of the
West beckoned. Meanwhile, Chancellor Kohl was
becoming alarmed. The East Germans flooding to
West Germany, which was trying to cope with its
own unemployment and housing problems, were,
on second thoughts, not all that welcome. Would
it not be better after all if they stayed in their own
reformed eastern half of Germany?
In the DDR economic collapse and mounting
popular protest were wresting control from the
communist leadership. Scandals and corruption
were revealed. A reformist communist, Hans
Modrow, replaced Krenz early in December
1989. His hold on power was brief and tenuous.
The West Germans were, in a sense, also in
danger of losing control. Their fear was that they
would be swamped with Germans from the East.
Kohl, who had hesitated until the close of 1989,
had little alternative in 1990 but to ride the tiger.
Once he came to this conclusion he campaigned
with increasing gusto. First, in late November
1989, he put forward a plan for a ‘confederation’
of the two Germanies. This was not well received
in Moscow, nor was it much welcomed by Mrs
Thatcher’s government. The former Second
World War Allies would in any case have the last
word. Thatcher and Mitterrand advised a cautious
approach; Bush, with better judgement, gave his
full backing to Kohl.
The German people in the end decided the
pace. Once free elections in East Germany had
been conceded, the New Forum, with its objective
of creating a civilised, socialist East German
state, and other spontaneous political groups with
odd labels were all swept aside. The West German
heavyweight parties moved in, the CDU, the FDP
and the SPD. East German party clones of the
Western parties campaigned for control. Kohl and
Genscher, Brandt and SPD politicians were rapturously
received in the East.
The complete unification of Germany proved
unstoppable and happened much faster than
anyone expected. Kohl carried all before him on
a barn-storming six-city election tour in March
1990, promising currency union and a one-forone
exchange of East German into West German
marks. The election on 18 March 1990 gave a
landslide victory to the East German CDU, and
its chairman, Lothar de Maizière became the new
East German prime minister. On 1 July, the currency
union was carried through as promised,
with the one-to-one exchange for savings up to
4,000 marks.
Maizière was still hoping for a gradual process
of unification, but the majority of East Germans
wanted no delay. Meanwhile, in July, at a meeting
between Kohl and Gorbachev, agreement was
quickly reached. Gorbachev dropped his objection
to united Germany remaining a member of
NATO; in return Kohl agreed to cut German
troops from 590,000 to 370,000 and renounced
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Gorbachev agreed to pull the Russian troops out
of East Germany by 1994, and Kohl promised to
pay for their rehousing in the Soviet Union. With
the Soviet Union and the US now consenting to
union, the other two treaty powers, France and
Britain, could no longer delay their formal
consent. In the meantime the bankruptcy of the
East German state forced Maizière to give up
negotiating for a gradual unification. On 23
August 1990 the Volkskammer voted to dissolve
the state and for East Germany to become part
of the Federal Republic. Such a suicide was
unique in the history of international politics –
but then the patient was terminally ill.
At midnight, 3 October 1990, to the muted
tones of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’
and beneath a sky lit up by fireworks, the most
momentous change in the transformation of
Eastern Europe was consummated. By now, no
one in West Germany any longer believed that unification
would be an easy or cheap or painless
process. Still, Kohl had become the first post-war
chancellor of all Germany, and he reaped the
reward for his skilful leadership, so ably supported
by Genscher, when in the December 1990 all-
German election the SPD was soundly beaten and
the CDU/CSU and its partner the FDP emerged
with a substantially increased majority. Kohl had
promised his country’s neighbours that Germany
would be a good European, democratic and peaceful.
His sincerity on that point, reflecting the views
of the vast majority of the German people, was not
in doubt. Germany in any case had enough trouble
of its own to discourage even the thought of
adventurism. Here ended the history of a separate
East German state. The history of the old DDR
henceforth was part of Germany’s development.
World History
