Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (62 page)

Also weakening opposition was the fact that all these groups were permeated by the system and to some extent compromised by it. This was true in the most obvious sense that they were often effectively penetrated by security services and their informers; the scale and terrifying
intimacy of such operations—with husband spying on wife, for example—has only emerged with revelations from official archives after 1989. But compromise and collusion occurred more indirectly as well. The religious authorities, for example, rarely encouraged outright protest and preferred a more indirect and cautious attitude towards power; their primary goal, after all, was the protection and defence of their own institutions and privileges. The Catholic Church in Poland under Cardinal Glemp, a British observer noted in 1983, was “alarmed at its own strength” in the aftermath of Solidarity. If this was the case with the most vigorous potential opponent to communism behind the Iron Curtain, it is easy to see how limited a role the more subservient Catholic, Lutheran or Orthodox authorities elsewhere chose to play.
²⁰

Such an attitude rested on an assessment of the basic durability of East European communism which was broadly shared by another potentially powerful source of opposition—the West. Western governments—and in general, Western public opinion, too—never seriously challenged the communist hold over the region. In fact, given the West’s basic acquiescence—right through the 1980s—in the Cold War division of Europe, it is hard to criticize East Europeans for their lack of more vigorous opposition. Few people anywhere, after all, believed in the possibility—or even perhaps the desirability—of a rapid introduction of multi-party democracy.

On the contrary, the 1970s saw a new acceptance of communist rule by the capitalist West. Financially, as we have seen, this took the form of extensive credits. Politically, it was expressed in West German
Ostpolitik
, and superpower détente. By the early 1980s, too much was at stake to let Reaganite neo-conservatism, the onset of the so-called “second Cold War” and the row about nuclear-missile deployments in western Europe, erode this basic understanding. Western policy aimed to wear the Soviet Union down in the long run through an expensive arms race. But the other side of this “dual track” strategy was the continued provision of trade credits to eastern Europe, the decision not to declare Poland in default, and to prop up the Hungarian and East German banking system. West Germany’s Chancellor Kohl was as committed to
Ostpolitik
as his Social Democrat predecessors had been, buying out East German dissidents and massively subsidizing
the communist economy, backing Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law, and eventually even allowing Honecker to make an official visit to the FRG in 1987.

In sum, the opposition which existed in the East was fragmented, inchoate and without determined foreign backing. Western individuals and NGOs offered their support to dissidents, but Western governments were chiefly interested in stability. In the 1980s, opposition to communism coalesced not around political reform but around more general issues of moral renewal, human rights, freedom and peace. In a one-party state these could not but be political in their implications, but they tended—and this was, of course, a condition of their existence—not to produce mass organizations or to offer political alternatives.

One key focus for protest was environmental pollution, especially after the Chernobyl disaster: the Stasi got very irritated by posters in an East German churchyard which read: “Ride a bike, don’t drive a car.” The Hungarian Danube Circle was an unofficial movement with thousands of signatories and strong links in Austria. In Czechoslovakia, Charter 77 circulated a document in 1987 entitled “Let the People Breathe,” which disclosed grim official estimates of the republic’s pollution levels. Yet arguably, even here, the level of activism was rather less than in the Soviet Union itself, and especially in the Baltic states.

The vast security services which monitored popular opinion do not appear to have been unduly alarmed by levels of opposition. “Conformity and grumbling” was the pattern discerned by the Stasi, and the former had probably grown rather than diminished over time. Soviet-sponsored Stalinism had come to be seen as the region’s fate, against which only the headstrong or saintly rebelled. Compared with the Nazi Gestapo, the Stasi and the Romanian Securitate were enormous, technically advanced apparatuses of terror, easily able to coerce and intimidate the mass of the population into compliance. Only one source of destabilization eluded their control—Moscow itself. In 1987 Poland’s deputy prime minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, musing on the ever-present threat that “somebody” might intervene in the country’s internal affairs, was struck by a sudden thought: “What if that
somebody
, bearing in mind his own interests, does not
want
to
intervene?” And what, indeed, if he did intervene—to challenge the old order? It is to this possibility that we must now turn.
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THE EVOLUTION OF SOVIET POLICY

Murder or suicide? Revolution or retreat? The same questions which are often asked of the ending of British rule in India, or of the Dutch in Indonesia, can be posed in the case of 1989 too. This is not by chance: communism’s demise formed part of the broader canvas of European decolonization.

The long age of empire, begun by Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth century, came to an end in the middle of our own. After the Second World War, itself a defeat for German imperial ambitions, the remaining European powers reluctantly divested themselves of their colonies too. The speed varied, but overall the process of decolonization was incredibly fast—a matter of decades—set against the lengthier rhythms of imperial conquest and consolidation. Whatever Marxist theorists of neo-imperialism may have felt—and it is true that Western economic influence did
not
in general decline after decolonization—the political act of dismantling empires was an act of tremendous significance.

Explaining the causes of decolonization—and especially its speed—has occupied historians ever since. Several points have become clearer. First, empire did not, on the whole, pay; to be more specific, while it offered huge profits to some individuals and companies, it burdened the treasuries of most imperial powers. Thus the exploitation of colonial peoples was not incompatible with net losses to taxpayers at home. Second, imperial powers were rarely forced to retreat as a direct result of military insurrection—Algeria was the exception not the rule. Insurgencies could usually be squashed; the problem was at what cost in lives and money. Nationalist historians like to argue that brave resistance fighters threw off the shackles of imperial rule; in practice, the warders in Whitehall and Paris usually decided when to close down (or unlock) the prison and retire.

Their decision was a compound of considerations—financial, military and politico-ideological. Imperial powers always had a choice whether or not to resort to force to uphold their rule. When they
did—like the French in Algeria and Vietnam or the Portuguese in southern Africa—they often ended up jeopardizing political stability at home. Increasingly, in the post-war era, they chose not to do so. One reason, of course, was that they came to realize that military domination was an expensive and clumsy way of getting what they wanted. Another for the Western powers was that their continued grip on empire suited neither their patron, the United States, nor their own domestic publics, who were chiefly concerned about prosperity inside a new Europe. The glamour of empire looked increasingly tarnished, its morality and rationality thrown into question in a continent which operated not according to global imperial rivalries and the possession of territory, but through transnational economic cooperation.

Thus, in the modern era, military defeat was not necessary to bring empires to their knees. It brought the collapse of the Ottoman, Spanish and Habsburg empires of course, but hardly that of the mightiest empire of them all, the British. As for Russia, the Tsarist empire had collapsed in 1917 under the pressure of war, yet Stalin’s empire survived and prospered after an even more vicious and destructive war only to collapse with such speed in a period of peace. One way to look at Soviet rule in eastern Europe is simply as an anachronism, a relic of past modes of rule no longer suited to the modern world. With a swiftness and political sophistication comparable to the British pull-out from India in 1947 or from West Africa a little later, the Kremlin chose to pull out from eastern Europe and the empire disintegrated almost overnight. Suicide, then, not murder. The reasoning underlying the Kremlin’s choice—the priority attached to domestic economic reform, the disillusion which followed the Afghanistan quagmire—becomes the key to the events of 1989.
²²

Although the Brezhnev years were ones of stagnation and ideological conservatism—the high priest of Soviet doctrinal purity, Mikhail Suslov, only died in 1982—beneath the surface there were indications of new ways of thinking about Soviet relations with eastern Europe. Brezhnev’s eventual successor, Yuri Andropov, had been Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, before heading the Kremlin’s main
liaison department with east European communist parties. There he gathered around him a group of reformers who would rise to senior positions in the 1980s. Andropov himself, who headed the KGB for most of the Brezhnev era, had a better idea than most in the Kremlin of the ruinous state of the communist empire, and after the Polish crisis of 1980–81 he spoke bluntly of the need for fresh thinking and urgent economic reform.

From the Soviet perspective, several factors encouraged new approaches towards eastern Europe. In the first place, the region, after acting as a net asset to Moscow in Stalin’s time, had now become an enormous economic burden, equivalent on one reckoning to 2 per cent of GNP per year: in the 1970s, massive subsidies, chiefly through cheap Soviet exports of fuels, meant that poorly-off Russians were subsidizing better-off Poles and Czechs. Eastern Europe’s CMEA, unlike the Common Market, was failing to generate a virtuous circle of greater productivity and wealth; rather it ossified bilateral trading arrangements (95 per cent of all CMEA activity) and encouraged mutual accusations of exploitation. Brezhnev’s 1971 plan for “socialist integration” was a damp squib compared with its capitalist counterpart. By the 1980s CMEA looked to the east Europeans like an instrument of Soviet nationalism; it was, in the words of one commentator, “a framework without much substance.” In the second half of the 1980s, the overall volume of Soviet-east European trade failed to grow at all.
²³

To make matters worse, the cost of supporting hundreds of thousands of troops in eastern Europe was also draining the economy. Moscow’s security policy had made the region entirely dependent upon Soviet arms, but the consequence was that the Soviet Union footed the bill for generating new weapons systems. On average, the Soviet Union spent 12–15 per cent of GNP on defence compared with 6 per cent by its satellites. Ironically, it faced exactly the same issue of unequal burden-sharing which preoccupied Nato states too; the difference was that the USA was far better equipped to handle the burden of being a superpower. To rub salt into the wound, the east Europeans were actually cutting back defence spending in the 1980s.
²⁴

From the strategic point of view, too, the importance of eastern
Europe to Soviet security needs had changed vastly since 1945. The Cold War was now being fought out in Asia as well as Europe. Détente diminished the threat from Germany and allowed Moscow to focus on its rival China, an infinitely more powerful and less predictable foe. Then came the war in Afghanistan and a Soviet military performance which increased doubts about its usefulness in eastern Europe. At the same time, east European elites responded to the breakdown of détente by insisting, against Soviet wishes, on the need to preserve links to Western economies. Bloc unity was less and less assured.

All this helps explain why the Soviet elite seemed to be coming round to the view, through the 1980s, that force had had its day. Unlike the Nazis, communists had never formally renounced the idea of the juridical equality of sovereign states. They had traditionally, however, justified granting a “leading role” to Moscow by appealing to the notion of “socialist internationalism” and “joint defence for the achievements of socialism,” phrases whose real meaning emerged in 1968. By 1983, stimulated by Brezhnev’s death and the rise of the reformist Andropov, a vigorous debate was under way among Russian scholars about whether or not a socialist community really existed. Reformers talked instead of “common-democratic principles of noninterference in internal affairs.”
²⁵

In 1985 Gorbachev was elected general secretary, the youngest ever to hold the post. His priority was domestic—to meet the economic challenge facing the USSR by replacing the Stalinist growth model of extensive development based around heavy industry with a more modern pattern using up-to-date technology and high productivity. The Lenin of the NEP—experimental, pragmatic yet committed to the cause of socialism—became his model. In the mind of this adroit product of the communist system,
perestroika
was thus intended to regenerate the Soviet economy, not to destroy it.

In many ways, the Gorbachev reform programme was similar to that pursued earlier in parts of eastern Europe. But there was a key doctrinal difference. Gorbachev was far freer than, say, Kádár to speculate about the political aspects of reform. Soon it became clear that for the Soviet leader, a successful restructuring of the economy—and revitalization of socialism—depended upon greater freedom of
information, and even—in an arresting phrase—upon “the democratization of all parts of our society.”
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