Remembering 1989

The Start of the Year

As 1989 began, I was working as a journalist in Vienna for a small publishing outfit called Business International (BI), affiliated with Britain's Economist Group. From our office at the eastern end of Austria, just 40 miles west of Bratislava, a small team of around 10 journalists and analysts would read over news reports coming across the Iron Curtain in order to help our readers and clients, mainly large Western corporations, understand the political and economic environment there.

Our flagship publication at BI was a newsletter called “Business Eastern Europe.” For most of 1989, I was a reporter for the newsletter and responsible for covering Czechoslovakia; at the end of that year, I became the publication’s editor. We were unique at the time among Western newsletters for our specific focus on Eastern Europe, and the communist regimes of the Eastern bloc were convinced that we were spies. If we were in fact spies, no one ever told me, and the Central Intelligence Agency owes me some back pay. (When I originally wrote this post in 2019, I had no idea how strongly the Eastern European regimes had mistrusted our company, and how I personally had become a pawn in their spy-vs-spy game. Click here to read about that.)

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, there’s a revisionist current of thought that the hulking Eastern bloc would have eventually collapsed under its own weight anyway, and that the sclerotic Soviet-led regimes would never have been able to keep up with the dynamic societies of Western Europe and the United States. After all, back in the day, the repressive governments would enforce their rigid censorship by confiscating dissenters’ typewriters. How would they have ever coped with the ubiquitous mobile-phone networks and Internet connections that by 1989 were just a few years down the road?

That may be true (we'll never know), but I can say with certainty that no one at the time saw the fall of communism coming. At BI, it was our job -- our bread and butter -- to anticipate and predict historic events like the collapse of communism, but even then as we squinted and stared at the regimes across the border, we couldn’t have said with any confidence, day-to-day, what was going to happen next.

The Gorbachev Question

When I think back on our kitchen conversations in Vienna that year, the conjecture inevitably turned on the personality of then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev had risen to power in the mid-1980s by promoting political and economic reform in Eastern Europe centered on his ideas of glasnost and perestroika ("transparency" and "economic restructuring.")

The big question at the time, though, was whether he was sincere in his efforts (or powerful enough) to reform the communist system or was simply inventing new wrinkles to maintain Soviet control. If he was indeed sincere, was he willing to risk Soviet domination over Eastern Europe in order to implement his ideas? Our office appeared to be split on the answers. While we hoped for the best, some of us believed in Gorbachev’s intentions (or abilities) and others did not. No one knew for certain.

To be sure, by 1989 the Gorbachev phenomenon had defied historical logic. Past reform efforts in the Eastern bloc had always been led by one of the smaller countries within the bloc and it was the Soviet Union that then stepped in to impose communist orthodoxy (as it did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). This time around, however, it was the Soviet Union pushing for reform, and, ironically, the leaders of many of the Eastern satellites who were resisting.

Supporting the view that real change can’t happen was the fact that the Eastern bloc countries mostly lacked any credible organized opposition to communist rule. Whatever Gorbachev said he wanted, the fact remained that the Kremlin could have stopped the reforms at any moment it chose. Sure, Poland had the Solidarity trade union, and Czechoslovakia and East Germany had a handful of courageous dissidents, but who or what could step in to force the old leaders out and then wake up the next day to run the trains, schools and factories?

We were all about to get a big lesson in people power later that year, but as things got rolling in early ’89 our biggest fear was that it would all end in bloodshed.

How it Went Down

When we look back on those days from the present, it’s easy to imagine that the whole of Eastern Europe simply rose up as one to throw off their oppressors. In fact, the anticommunist revolutions unfolded over the course of the year in a series of separate episodes that might better be understood as isolated acts of defiance. There was, in fact, very little coordination among the countries of the Eastern bloc. Each nation took a different tack, and the actions in any one of those places could have been stopped in its tracks. There was plenty of chance and luck built into the model.

The fall of communism began with a whimper (not a bang) in June that year when Poland held its first semi-free parliamentary elections since at least the end of World War II. That vote led to a humiliating defeat for the ruling communist party and the appointment that summer of Eastern Europe’s first non-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The reaction from Moscow was muted, even though documents would surface later suggesting that Gorbachev had come under strong pressure from hard-line Eastern bloc leaders, like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu, to intervene militarily.

A few weeks later, on June 27, the leaders of Hungary and Austria met in an abandoned field to symbolically cut the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain that had separated their countries since the end of World War II. I remember watching that spectacle at the time in Vienna as it unfolded live on Austrian television, but not giving it much significance. I figured the Hungarians would simply replace the wire with a more sophisticated electronic system.

None of us realized at the time, though, that this episode had been carefully choreographed in advance between Gorbachev and then-Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh, and that the opening was more or less legit. The Soviets had given the Hungarians their private assurances that whatever happened, there would be no repeat of 1956. Németh later told the French news agency, AFP, about that agreement and its consequences here.

Indeed, this pre-planned piece of theater might well have been the most important single event of that entire year. While I had dismissed the cutting of the Iron Curtain, the significance of this gesture was not lost on people living behind the Iron Curtain. They began to calculate that if they could just make it to Hungary, they could eventually make it to the West. The simple act of snipping some barbed wire had set the entire train in motion.

The months of July and August marked a major turning point in the anticommunist revolutions and, looking back, the postwar history of Europe. The events in Poland and Hungary had divided the bloc essentially into two camps: the reformers and the hard-liners. Opposed to Hungary and Poland, on the other side, were the far more conservative (and much less enthusiastic about glasnost and perestroika) regimes of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania.

The tension was thick that summer. The movement toward reform in the Eastern bloc was accelerating, yet it was hard to imagine any outcome that didn’t involve blood. Would ultra-conservative leaders like Erich Honecker in East Germany, Miloš Jakeš in Czechoslovakia or Ceaușescu in Romania relinquish power without a fight? That outcome seemed highly unlikely.

All eyes turned again toward Gorbachev. Instead of putting the brakes on the reform momentum, though, at every turn (whether he intended to or not), he appeared to give the reformers the green light. Addressing a tense, divided meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders in Bucharest in early July, Gorbachev told the group that there was what he called a “new spirit” in the alliance. In just a few words (and couched in his trademark double-speak), he appeared to say that the Warsaw Pact member states would be free to pursue their own paths (without fear of Soviet military intervention).

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Bucharest's presidential palace to see the ashen looks on the faces of the hard-liners, including host Ceaușescu himself. Whatever would happen next, it was becoming increasingly clear from Gorbachev’s words that the Soviet Union would not call in the tanks.

The Berlin Wall & Velvet Revolution

The dramatic events of 1989 we best remember now are the euphoric fall of the Berlin Wall and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. But those happy memories represented merely a denouement – a logical conclusion -- following from Gorbachev’s summer pronouncements. Without the implied threat of Soviet military support, each of the Eastern bloc regimes was left to fend for itself and grapple with the difficult issue of whether it was willing to kill its own citizens to stay in power.

This blog post has already gone way over-length (if you're still with me, thank you), so I’ll cut to the chase: To their credit -- whether they consciously decided not to use bullets or simply lost their nerve -- the leaders of most of the Eastern bloc countries did not resist.

In September that year, the Hungarian government, after some hand-wringing, decided to allow a large group of East Germans who had gathered there to cross freely into Austria in an event that’s now called the “Pan European Picnic.” That act was widely viewed as a final test of Gorbachev’s implied promise not to intervene, and true to his assurances, the Soviets didn’t react.

That exodus spurred more East Germans to try to leave their country, but instead of going all the way to Hungary, they instead drove to nearby Prague to demand their freedom. Bowing to international pressure, on September 30, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher travelled to the Czechoslovak capital in order to grant permission to East Germans gathered there to travel freely to West Germany. The wall in Berlin was still standing, though clearly fraying across the rest of the bloc.

With widespread fear now ebbing away, East German citizens started to protest across their country in the hundreds of thousands. The Berlin Wall fell on the night of November 9. The mechanism for opening the gates had been bureaucratic incompetence (an East German official simply misread his orders). Tellingly, though, mystified East Germans simply walked through the threshold; the guards’ guns never fired.

Emboldened by events in Berlin, students in Prague began protesting on the night of November 17. Rumors that the country’s military police had killed at least one of the protesters (later determined to be false) helped to bring the general population over to the side of the demonstrators. Soon, hundreds of thousands of people from all parts of society were gathering nightly on Prague’s Wenceslas Square and around Czechoslovakia. By the end of the year, the ruling communists would step down without incident and the country would be led by the playwright and anti-communist dissident, Václav Havel.

In the end, without the threat of Soviet military intervention, all it took to knock down the Berlin Wall was for someone to walk through it. All it took to push out the criminal gang in Prague was to jangle enough keys on Wenceslas Square. (I certainly don’t mean here to diminish the courage and heroism of the demonstrators in East Germany and Czechoslovakia on those November nights. They, like us, had no way of knowing how their leaders would respond. They risked their lives, and the lives of their countrymen, in support of freedom).

It was only in Romania where we were all offered a chilling “counterfactual” of what would happen if a dictatorship attempted to use force on its people without the implied threat of Soviet military backing -- and that didn’t end well. In mid-December, anti-Ceaușescu protests started up in the western Romanian city of Timișoara and soon spread to other places, including Bucharest. These quickly led to the abdication of leader Ceaușescu, and the shocking executions by firing squad on Christmas Day of both him and his wife, Elena.

It took just a little over a week for the Ceaușescus to be captured, tried by an ad-hoc tribunal and killed. More than 1,000 people died in that bloody transfer of power, and it’s probably fair to say that the violence set Romania back at least a decade.