1989 - Twenty Years After:A personal reflection on the events of a remarkable year

Serious analysis of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe, and of the Soviet Union itself, between 1989 and 1991 is in rather short supply.  Most of what  passes for analysis is little more than ideologically motivated triumphalism reflecting the engrained cold war sentiments of the analysts. Such analysis is hardly more enlightening than the Manichean simplicities of a Reagan or a Bush. In my – admittedly limited – study of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, there is very little that has offered much enlightenment. Amongst British journalists, Neal Ascherson and Jonathan Steele have made valuable contributions, as has former Guardian reporter Michael Simmons. They all have extensive knowledge of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before and after 1989. The only academics with whom I am familiar whose work merits serious study are the American Russian scholars Stephen F. Cohen and Moshe Lewin. In particular, Cohen’s “Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia”, is a brilliant, searing indictment of U.S. policy towards Russia in the 1990s.

My comments below make no pretence to be analytical. Any value they may have is due to the fact that for many years I had a close association with East Germany – the former German Democratic Republic. I have no first hand experience of Russia and my knowledge of other counties of Eastern Europe is limited to occasional visits between 1959 and 1984 to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia. I went once to Warsaw in 1995.  Despite a tendency to treat all the Soviet satellites as pretty much the same, there were, in fact, huge differences between them. Actually, they were not all Soviet satellites. Yugoslavia, under Tito, was fiercely independent of the USSR and strongly critical of Stalinism. Albania, under Enver Hoxha, was an unreconstructed bastion of Stalinism but defiantly hostile to Khrushchev’s Russia. Romania, under the megalomaniacal rule of Ceaucescu, also ploughed it own separate furrow.  What characterised all these countries was that, to a lesser or greater degree, they were bureaucratic dictatorships. They were all self-proclaimed socialist states, in which the main means of production had been nationalised. Private enterprise was either non-existent or confined to some areas of agriculture and small scale businesses. But although official propaganda proclaimed that political power was in the hands of the workers and peasants and that all property belonged to the people, in reality the people had no independent voice and were unable freely to express any opinion that was contrary to the official party line.  The most liberal of these states was Yugoslavia; the least liberal was its close neighbour, Albania. Interestingly, these two countries were the only ones in Eastern Europe that owed little or nothing to the Soviet army for the establishment of communist rule after World War Two. Home grown partisan movements in each case overthrew the Axis occupation without Soviet support.

The process that ended with the collapse of communist rule from the Baltic to the Adriatic, started in Poland in 1980 with the growth of the independent trade union movement, Solidarity. Following the assumption of power by Gorbachev in Moscow in 1985 and the pursuit of glasnost and perestroika, it was made clear to the leaders of the “people’s democracies” that, in the event of domestic difficulties leading to threats to communist party rule, they could not rely on Soviet intervention of the kind that had occurred in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.  From that moment it should have been clear to the leaders of the satellites that their days were numbered.

While on holiday in Switzerland in August 1989, I recall reading a copy of the West German periodical “Der Spiegel” which carried an account of the escalating exodus from East Germany over the Hungarian border into Austria. The title, “A State loses its People” conveyed more vividly than anything I had seen, the sense of a terminal crisis. Not only could the human haemorrhage not be stemmed but it was difficult to see how the state itself could survive for much longer. Would Erich Honecker attempt to crush by force the multitudes that gathered on the streets of Leipzig?  In October Gorbachev, visiting Berlin for the 40th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, left his ally in no doubt that the Soviet Union was opposed to repression. Honecker and his supporters in the Socialist Unity Party leadership, were isolated. He was removed from power and less intransigent elements in the party attempted to seek accommodation with the popular opposition. The armed forces and the police could no longer be relied upon to contain the situation and, on November 9^th the authorities stood aside as the Berlin wall was breached.

On New Year’s Eve 1989 I travelled to Berlin with two friends from the United States. We witnessed the exuberant celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate and on January 1^st we joined the thousands milling through the gate to the Unter den Linden in East Berlin. Uniformed soldiers of the border patrol of the People’s Army fraternised with the crowds of West Berliners. In East Berlin we engaged in protracted discussions with old friends, all of whom welcomed the fall of the wall.

My oldest friend in East Berlin, whom I had known since the early 1960s, was then nearly 80 years old.  For many years a professor of economics, he and his wife were both members of the party despite the fact that while in the Soviet Union where they had gone in the early 1930s as refugees from Hitler, they had both been incarcerated for 18 years in Stalin’s slave labour camps. Needless to say, they were critical party members who had no illusions about the nature of the system under which they lived. But they continued to believe in the possibility of socialism. For me, they and others like them with whom I became acquainted, personified the tragedy of Stalinism.

With the defeat of Nazism at the end of the Second World War, East Germany fell under Soviet occupation. With the formal division of Germany in 1949 into two separate states, the German Democratic Republic from the start had even less independence than the other states of Eastern Europe that fell within the Soviet bloc. Whatever aspirations the communist rulers may have had to build socialism independently from the USSR, all such hopes were crushed as the cold war intensified from the late 1940s. A rigid Stalinist model was imposed upon all of them – with the exception of Yugoslavia, which successfully resisted. Despite some relaxation after Stalin’s death in 1953, the system remained essentially the same.             Everywhere the communist party held a monopoly of power. According to the dominant ideology the state represented the power of the people and the nationalised industries and collectivised agriculture amounted to “people’s ownership” in an “actually existing socialism”. Few actually believed the propaganda. Most resented what they regarded as the systematic lying to which they were subjected but many acquiesced for an easier life. Cynicism was widespread and this was particularly pronounced in the GDR. The wall, erected in 1961 to quell the flood, particularly of highly qualified people, to West Germany, was officially designated the “anti-fascist defence barrier”. Even high-ranking functionaries of the regime regarded this as a joke.

But the fall of the wall did not mean that East Germans were all desperate to leave their homeland for the bright lights and high living standards of the Federal Republic. Many – perhaps most – felt very ambivalently about their shabby, colourless republic. They wanted to retain the benefits of living under “actually existing socialism”, and such benefits were not inconsiderable. They included secure jobs, universal nursery care, cheap fixed rents, and, compared to the rest Eastern Europe, a relatively comfortable standard of living.  Against this they wanted freedom to travel and freedom of speech. They wanted the best of both worlds but they certainly wanted to be rid of the oppressive surveillance society where no-one knew whether their closest neighbours may have been spying for the Stasi.

By the early nineties, after the euphoria of 1989 had resulted in a hasty reunification rushed through to suit the electoral interests of Helmut Kohl, the mood in the East had become much more sober. West German corporations had bought up most of the antiquated industry of the GDR and closed it down. A state that had not known unemployment became a poor relation with nearly four million unemployed. Rents for decent apartments that had been pegged at the equivalent of £10 per month increased overnight more than tenfold as whole swathes of state property were bought up by West German speculators. Many East Germans, (or “Ossies” as they became known) adapted and thrived. Often they were the ones who had thrived under the old system. Many more were cast onto the scrap heap. Twenty years on the blighted landscape of wide areas of the former GDR testifies to the failure of re-unification to solve the problems it created.

A refrain heard frequently then was “Not everything was bad in the GDR.” From those old enough to remember, one may still hear it today. Very few want to return to “actually existing socialism” but for many the dreams they entertained in 1989 of participating fully in the prosperity of the Federal Republic, have turned out to be illusions.