1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Read online

  The border guards shoot one in the foot and the other, Chris Gueffroy, in the heart. Gueffroy dies within a few minutes. His friend survives, to be hauled away in the freezing cold of a February night and sentenced to three years in jail.4

  These are only three tiny snapshots, from 1981, 1983, and 1989, but they capture the prominent features on the landscape of the Cold War’s final years. A sense of conflict and stalemate persisted well into the 1980s, which made the dramatic events in the second half of 1989 all the more surprising. Indeed, the 1980s were some of the most anxious years of the Cold War, characterized by new tensions after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the election of Reagan to the presidency and anti-Reagan campaigns in the Soviet Union, and the launch of the controversial “Star Wars” missile defense program in 1983. Within the USSR, the opposition movement began to lose hope of ever seeing a better future. A leading historian of the Soviet Union finds that in the 1980s, “the dissident movement seemed at its lowest ebb since its emergence in the 1960s. Most leading dissidents were in labor camps or exile. Those who remained at liberty were under constant KGB (the Soviet Committee for State Security) surveillance. Samizdat literature was reduced to a trickle.” 5

  As Scherbakova’s memory suggests, fear and hatred were constant components of that stalemated situation. Ordinary people living both in the East and the West worried about the destructive power afforded to world leaders by thermonuclear weapons—both rulers on the other side and their own. Such weapons cast a long shadow over everyday life. Instructing schoolchildren about the evils of the other side was only one manifestation of this.6 The apocalyptic television film The Day After in 1983 was another. The film depicted the gruesome destruction of U.S. cities in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and, as the title indicates, the horrific consequences of radiation poisoning for those who survived the initial attack. A poll about the film and its pacifist message, conducted by the Washington Post the next day, found that a staggering 83 percent of Americans wanted a freeze in the construction of any further thermonuclear weapons.7

  Europeans had similar worries. They knew that thanks to the short-range nuclear missiles installed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by both military alliances, they would be near-instantaneous victims of a superpower shooting war. On one day alone in October 1983, a million West Germans turned out to protest the installation of such weapons. The following year, the pop singer Herbert Grönemeyer made himself a wealthy man with a hit called “Amerika.” The album containing this song, which suggested that Yanks and Russians should fight each other not in Europe but rather on some uninhabited place like the moon, spent eighty weeks at the top of the charts in West Germany. The lack of freedom of assembly, speech, and commerce on the other side of the iron curtain meant that there were not similar protests, pop hits, or sales, but the opposition movement made disarmament by both sides one of its credos; hence the name of Jahn’s group, Swords into Ploughshares.8

  Such fears have a larger conceptual significance. Some scholars now ask whether the Cold War was simply a deceit or fiction, an artificial notion, and a threadbare and risible one even while ostensibly still in place. Their argument is that when viewed with the advantage of scholarly hindsight, the continuities overshadow the changes. The so-called Cold War in fact represented the processes of empire and colonization continuing under new names. As a result, this school of thought holds that scholars “ought to remove the Cold War lens” and “transcend their own imaginary categories” that artificially distort the past.9

  To some extent the concept of a Cold War completely divorced from what came before and after is indeed misleading, as there were certainly continuities with a number of preceding eras. The practice of projecting force beyond national borders clearly had imperial ancestry. But the population on the ground—most notably in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but also in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and a number of other locations around the globe—had to pay for this particular fiction in unique ways, and kept paying for it until the end. Residents of the Soviet Bloc had to endure life in garrison states primed for nuclear conflict both internally and externally, with countless consequences for everyday existence. Extraordinary percentages of the gross domestic product of the USSR went to military procurement and deployment; contemporary major nations generally spend around 1 to 4 percent, but Gorbachev learned when he became general secretary that the Soviet Union was spending 20 to 30 percent. Militaristic schooling led to mandatory service. Even though East Germany had just sixteen million inhabitants, half a million of them had to carry weapons at the behest of the state, either as part of the military or the Stasi. Moreover, the need for security served as a justification for constant policing of the population to ensure good behavior. At its height, the East German secret police had 1 employee for every 180 East Germans. The technology of both weapons and surveillance, in short, created a unique era.10

  It is, as a result, an oversimplification to consider the Cold War to be merely a coda to colonialism. The era may not have been unique, but it was hardly fictional. Fears of thermonuclear destruction, and their consequences for societal order and generational beliefs and experiences, were new features both in the West and the East, and defined the age.

  A second feature of the Cold War landscape in Eastern Europe emerges from the snapshot of Jahn. It is important to remember that hopes for a better future were not always synonymous with hopes of escaping to the West or importing a Western lifestyle. Getting shipped off to West Berlin was indeed a punishment for Jahn, as the Stasi intended it to be. He wanted to create a new German Democratic Republic (GDR), not put his feet up in a comfortable, capitalist country. In a daring move in 1985, Jahn smuggled himself back into East Germany. He flew to East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, pretending that he would transit directly from there into West Berlin, but instead slipped away from the airport controls and sought refuge with old friends in his hometown of Jena. He also met with prominent members of the East Berlin opposition scene. To his dismay, they told him he had to stay in the West, because he could be of much more help to their cause there. With their aid, Jahn got himself back to West Berlin, where he would serve a critical role in 1989, to be described below.11

  Relevant here is the point that many East German dissidents believed socialism—and not just the watered down variant of Western-style social democracy—still had a chance, if the corrupt leadership of the Warsaw Pact could be removed. In some ways this belief separated the East Germans from other East European protesters, who were more skeptical about socialism’s chances. Once Gorbachev took power, such East German views ironically put the GDR dissident movement on the side of the Soviet leader; Gorbachev’s “new thinking” was also aimed at producing a better socialism, not an imitation of social democracy. He knew that the Soviet Union was on the verge of ruin in 1989, but felt strongly that such new thinking was the answer, rather than the wholesale adoption of the democratic, market-economy example. In other words, his idea was to create something different from either the Soviet past or the West European present. This notion echoed visions of la terza via (the third way) and Eurocommunism popularized by the Italian Communist Party. Such notions served as powerful touchstones for reformists throughout Eastern Europe and Gorbachev, and could potentially have opened up avenues to the future.12

  Finally, a third feature of the Cold War landscape emerges from the death of Gueffroy in February 1989; that year, pushing limits was still risky and indeed deadly. Just as there was a threat of nuclear violence on the international level, there was also an ongoing threat of violence at the individual level right until the end. Gueffroy’s case was an extreme example, but the violence used against protesters from Beijing to Berlin well into October 1989 shows what any challenger to the status quo had to face. In hindsight we know that little blood was shed in Europe, but the situation at the time was fraught with risk. The peaceful ending in Central Europe was not an obvious outcome, particularly with the shoot-to-kill practic
e still in place on the inner-German border in 1989, and hundreds of thousands of foreign troops still stationed there. Attempts to challenge the status quo remained dangerous and costly at the ground level.

  They were dangerous at the top level as well. In 1988, when Reagan met Gorbachev for the last time as president, the American repeated a favorite joke he had gotten from Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had complained that if, while in office, he had gone to the Potomac River and “walked out on top of the water,” then the press would have reported “that the President could not swim.” 13 Gorbachev laughed, and then pointed out less than politely that Reagan had told him the joke before; but apparently the apt message (whether intended or unintended) did not sink in either time. No matter how many miracles Gorbachev worked, it would never be enough to impress his critics. Even though he and Reagan had done a great deal with their arms control agreements to chip away at world fear of a thermonuclear exchange, the public would want more.

  Gorbachev’s new thinking had indeed started to raise expectations among the broader population that he could not fulfill. His reforms, creating new institutions outside the party in 1989, gave his opponents a chance to air their views. His prioritization of the Soviet Union’s massive domestic economic problems—by 1990, shortages were as intense as during wartime—contributed to a hands-off approach to Eastern Europe.14 Meanwhile, the rulers in Poland and Hungary opened new doors to the opposition. But if Gorbachev had been largely sympathetic to the goals of reformist Communists and negotiation-friendly dissident leaders, there were limits. He maintained that the events of 1968 in Prague were in fact a disreputable counterrevolution; in other words, a dramatic overthrow of the Communist order was out of bounds.15 Gorbachev, the great reformer, was thus not at all happy at the dramatic change in divided Germany.

  To sum up: if the characteristics of the Cold War landscape in the 1980s were an ongoing mixture of threats on both the international and individual level, combined with hopes for a new kind of future, what changed in 1989 to yield the sudden opening of the Berlin Wall? Answering this question is crucial, because—as subsequent chapters will describe—the nature and timing of the wall’s disappearance produced an unexpected contest to define what kind of political and social order would follow.

  Obviously, in 1989 there were long-term developments coming to fruition, most notably the economic disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nothing described below is meant to deny the importance of such developments. Yet all of those developments had been going on for years. The goal here is not to recapitulate them, nor to describe every significant event of the late 1980s; rather, the question is a narrower one. What changed during summer and autumn 1989? Why did it become the year that the wall opened? Previously, gradual opening, cooperation, and slow reform served as the order of the day in Poland, Hungary, and even the Soviet Union itself, where semi-free elections took place in March 1989. But an entirely different process began after the wall unexpectedly crumbled.

  Close analysis of five selected events from 1989 helps to provide an answer. The causal chain that ends with East Berliners drinking champagne in West Berlin on November 9 includes the following five significant developments: (1) the Beijing example fails to transfer to Europe and the consensus for nonviolence solidifies, thereby diminishing the sense of threat that had defined the Cold War until its final year; (2) the Americans choose to step back, forcing Gorbachev to do the same, and making it clear to people on the ground in Eastern Europe that change must come at their initiative; (3) East Germans, long the laggards in protest movements, take the lead in challenging the status quo; (4) their self-confidence increases as they do so; and (5) television transforms reality at a crucial moment.

  TIANANMEN FAILS TO TRANSFER

  In 1989, several significant anniversaries reminded the world of how changeable political order could be.16 Forty years previously, a Communist China, two German states, and a new military alliance—NATO—had all emerged from the lingering chaos of World War II. Fifty years earlier, Hitler had destroyed the global order by starting that war. And during a fateful July two hundred years earlier, the French Revolution had rocked the monarchical establishment.

  Protesters in Beijing were hoping that the fortieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China would be remembered for major changes as well, but they were to be disappointed. The opposing outcomes in the cities of Beijing and Leipzig showed that while violence against individuals remained a viable and successful option for Communist leaders in 1989, it would no longer be used in the European context. This was a critical and essential condition for everything that followed, which ensured that Europe would lead the changes in 1989 and China would not. What happened in Beijing, and how was it different from Leipzig? Why did the Tiananmen example fail to transfer?

  Map 1.1. Selected Major Cold War Borders and Cities

  In late May 1989, masses of protesters had filled Tiananmen Square at the heart of China’s capital city. They had been emboldened by a Gorbachev visit intended, ironically, to improve Sino-Soviet relations. These protesters openly challenged the authority of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and built a rough facsimile of the Statue of Liberty right in front of an enormous portrait of Mao Zedong at the entrance to the Forbidden City. Deng reportedly declared to his party’s ruling Politburo members that they had only themselves to blame: “Our biggest mistake was in education. We haven’t educated our kids and students enough.” With forceful enough action, however, “it’s possible a bad thing could turn into a good one.” Presumably he meant that the tanks shortly to roll into Tiananmen Square would provide an education to the protesters, a kind of remedial lesson to make up for previous shortcomings.17 The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forcibly cleared the square on June 3–4. An image of a lone, unarmed man standing bravely in front of a column of tanks immediately became the worldwide visual icon of Chinese suppression. When it was all over, the Chinese Red Cross carried out a canvas of major area hospitals in an effort to find how many had been hurt; the organization finally estimated that twenty-six hundred people had died and a further seven thousand were wounded. Gorbachev was reportedly taken aback and dismayed by the bloodshed, and it contributed to his desire to pursue a different course. These deaths had happened, after all, even as the election that would bring Solidarity to power in cooperation with the previous rulers was under way in Poland—a process that the Soviet leader preferred to violence.18

  The Western world condemned the use of force, but the large number of European leaders voicing disapproval did not include any in East Berlin. The leader of the GDR, seventy-six-year-old Erich Honecker, was in failing health. Like Deng, he was searching for a cure to the headaches that Gorbachev was causing him, and saw China’s example as a ray of hope. Given that both the People’s Republic and East Germany were celebrating their fortieth anniversaries that year, Honecker decided that he could learn something from China.

  He had the head of the Stasi order special protection for the Chinese embassy in the wake of “counterrevolutionary unrest” after the Tiananmen violence.19 Next, Honecker directed the party-controlled television news program to broadcast reports suggesting that the pictures of wounded were fake.20 Finally, Honecker sent his crown prince, Egon Krenz, on a high-profile visit to the Chinese fortieth-anniversary celebrations at the start of October 1989. Krenz met with Deng, along with Li Peng, Li Zemin, and others. Afterward, Krenz filed a report that eerily echoed Deng’s June comments word for word.21 The Chinese Communist Party returned the favor by sending a delegation headed by Yao Yilin, vice premier and Politburo member, to appear in celebrations on the East German anniversary.22

  Fig. 1.1. A lone demonstrator blocks a column of tanks at the entrance to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, June 5, 1989. Photo by CNN via Getty Images.

  East German dissidents did not miss the point; Honecker wanted to march in lockstep with his colleagues in Beijing. His efforts were clearly meant to intimidate protesters in places like Dresden, where the fut
ure Russian president Putin was serving as one of the many KGB officers assigned to spy on NATO. Soon, Putin would have to start burning documents so furiously that he would break the KGB’s furnace, but that was in the future. In October 1989, it was not at all clear whether he would be burning or fighting; Putin felt strongly that he and his colleague had a right to defend Soviet interests by all means.23 Other East Europeans were worried as well; the Czech dissident Václav Havel in particular was concerned that a second Tiananmen could occur in Prague.24

  Evidence suggests strongly that Honecker did indeed hope to instigate a “German Tiananmen” on the night of Monday, October 9, in Leipzig. He chose that day because, by then, massive protest marches were occurring every Monday night in Leipzig. They followed the weekly peace prayers held at a major church. That particular Monday was auspicious in his eyes because it was the first suitable day for unseemly bloodshed after the forced jollity of the GDR’s own fortiethanniversary birthday party, two days earlier.25

  In preparation for that night, and acting on Honecker’s orders, Stasi chief Erich Mielke ordered every authorized Stasi agent to start carrying a weapon at all times. Leipzig authorities fielded a force of eight thousand, consisting of not only police officers but also Stasi and National People’s Army troops as well as others.26 According to one of the local church leaders, Pastor Christian Führer, Leipzig doctors specializing in the treatment of gunshot wounds called him to say that they had been ordered to report for duty. Hospitals were told to have surge capacity beds and blood reserves available.27 Foreign journalists, who had experienced rough handling when they tried to film the anniversary protests in Berlin, were banned from Leipzig altogether. Their reports about the violent attacks on peaceful protesters—sometimes using dogs—had displeased Honecker, and he wanted to avoid a repeat.28