Revolution 1989 Read Free

in the USSR from which the state never recovered. Communism in Europe survived only as long as capitalist bankers from the West were willing to bankroll it.
    The human factor is the principal answer, as so often. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a contradictory figure. A new kind of Kremlin chieftain, he could walk, talk and think on his own, unlike the geriatrics who preceded him, whose physical decay seemed to symbolise the condition of their country. He and a few of his advisers thought that the Soviet Union’s satellite states were not worth keeping if they could only be held with tanks. He did the right things, but for the wrong reason. His overriding aim was to save communism in the Soviet Union. He believed the people of Eastern Europe would choose to stay allied to the Soviets in a socialist commonwealth. His miscalculations were staggering. Given the chance, the East Europeans joyfully abandoned communism. Nor was Gorbachev able to save it in the USSR. By his own lights he was a failure, but millions of people have cause to be thankful to him. He was consoled for his errors when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
    A few of the other big personalities who emerge from these pages had a much clearer and more realistic grasp of events than the Soviet leader. The Polish Pope John Paul II, Lech Wałesa, the workers’ leader who defeated the workers’ state, Václav Havel, the playwright/ philosopher who turned himself into a man of action, and the hard-nosed East German despot Erich Honecker all knew communism was doomed if it was pushed in the right way. As this was the first fully televised revolution in history they became familiar faces. Television had a powerful effect in this drama. When people in Prague saw the Berlin Wall come down, they began to believe they too could overthrow their rulers. Ten days later they did. Nicolae Ceauescu lost power the moment his face was seen on Romanian television looking confused, then petrified and finally weak as crowds booed him at a Bucharest rally. Four days later he was dead.
    East Europeans liberated themselves, but the West played a vital part. The United States ‘won’ the Cold War and victors tend to write history. The classic narrative is that the toughness of Ronald Reagan brought down the evil empire of the Soviet Union. But Reagan was misunderstood. It was forty years of Western ‘containment’ that weakened the Soviet Union, and Reagan made no progress whatsoever in his first four years. It was only after Gorbachev emerged and Reagan tried a new, more conciliatory approach that a process began which ended the Cold War. Reagan was admirable in many ways, as this story will I hope show. But his cheerleaders praise him for the wrong things. That is less of an irony than the fate of his successor, George H.W. Bush, a cautious, moderate and sensible man. He valued ‘global stability’ as one of his primary aims. During periods of 1989, when revolutions were happening so fast, he feared the globe might become seriously unstable. He had been a Cold Warrior in his time and a former head of the CIA. He was leader of the Free World. As documents now show, as well as interviews with his aides, there were times in the middle of the year during which he tried desperately to keep Communist governments in power when he felt that Eastern Europe might be careering out of control.
     
    A word on geography and terminology. This story is about the fall of what the Soviet Union called its ‘outer empire’ - the six countries that comprised, under the USSR’s tutelage, the Warsaw Pact. They are very different places with vastly contrasting histories, cultures, religions and experiences. In the past they had as many antagonisms as alliances. I have not attempted to lump them together to invent a monolithic whole. But one thing they shared historically is that for forty-five years they were joined together, effectively under one ruler. It made sense to