criticism of East bloc regimes, Bonn’s statesmen afforded the leadership of the GDR a false sense of stability and security.
Moreover, by ‘buying out’ political opponents and prisoners, West Germany deprived the East German opposition of some of its best known dissenters. No other Communist society had a Western
Thus Rudolf Bahro, who after years of persecution was deported west in 1979, was best-known for his essay
What opposition there was in the GDR to Communism as such tended to coalesce, as in Poland, around the churches: in Germany the Protestant
Elsewhere in eastern Europe the Western ‘peaceniks’ and activists for nuclear disarmament were regarded with considerable suspicion. They were seen at best as naive innocents, more likely the mindless instruments of Soviet manipulation.[271] Vaclav Havel, for one, regarded the growing west European anti-war movement of the early 1980s as the perfect vehicle for engaging, diverting and
But in East Germany the peace movement found a deep local resonance. No doubt this was in part thanks to links with West Germany. But there was something else. The GDR—an accidental state with neither history nor identity—could with some shard of plausibility describe peace, or at least ‘peaceful coexistence’, as its true
In 1962 the East German regime had introduced a compulsory military service of eighteen months for all men aged 18-50. But two years later it added an escape clause: those who wished to be excused military service on moral grounds could join the
Thus when Lutheran pastors began in 1980 to offer support and protection to the early peace activists, they were able to do so to a considerable extent without incurring state disapproval. The nascent peace movement then spread from the churches to the universities, inevitably raising not only calls for disarmament, but also the demand for the right to articulate these calls without hindrance. In this indirect way dissenting East Germans belatedly found a way to communicate (and catch up) with the opposition elsewhere in the bloc.
Romanians had no such luck. The appearance of Charter 77 prompted a courageous letter of support from the writer Paul Goma and seven other Romanian intellectuals, all of whom were promptly suppressed. But otherwise Romania remained as silent as it had been for three decades. Goma was forced into exile: no-one took his place. For this the West bore a measure of responsibility—even if a Romanian Charter 77 or a local version of Poland’s
Even the Soviet Union allowed a tightly restricted liberty of action to certain intellectuals—mostly prominent scientists, always a privileged category. The biologist Zhores Medvedev, whose 1960s exposure of Lysenko had long circulated in
But Sakharov always insisted he was calling the Soviet Union to account for its shortcomings and its persecution of critics, rather than seeking its overthrow—a stance that put him somewhere between an older generation of reform Communists and the new Central European dissidents. Others, less prominent and avowedly anti-Soviet, were treated much more harshly. The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya spent three years in a prison psychiatric hospital, diagnosed along with hundreds of others with ‘sluggish schizophrenia’. Vladimir Bukovsky, the best known of the younger radicals, spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiatric wards before international outcry at his treatment led to his exchange for Luis Corvalan, a Chilean Communist, in 1976.
Except for such occasional protests on behalf of individuals, and a concerted campaign on behalf of the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, the West paid remarkably little attention to the
But with or without external prompting, the overwhelming majority of the Soviet intelligentsia was never going to follow the example being set, however tentatively, elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The fear inspired by Stalin’s repression hung like a pall across the moral landscape three decades after his death, even if no-one actually spoke of it, and all but the most outspoken and courageous critics took care to stay within the bounds of legitimate Soviet themes and language. They assumed, reasonably enough, that the Soviet Union was here to stay. Writers like Andrei Amalrik, whose essay ‘Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?’ first appeared in the West in 1970, and was re-published in expanded form ten years later, were prophetic but atypical. In contrast to the puppet regimes it had installed at its boundaries, the Soviet Union by 1983 had been in place for longer than most of its citizens could remember and appeared fundamentally stable.
The intellectual opposition in Central Europe had little immediate impact. This surprised no-one: the new realism of the Seventies-era dissidents encompassed not just a disabused grasp of Socialism’s failure but also a clear-sighted appreciation of the facts of power. There were limits, moreover, on what could be asked of people: in his ‘Essay on Bravery’ the Czechoslovak writer Ludvik Vaculik argued persuasively that one can ask only so much of ordinary people struggling to get through their daily lives. Most people lived in a sort of moral ‘grey zone’, a safe if stifling space in which enthusiasm was replaced by acceptance. Active, risk-laden resistance to authority was hard to justify because—again, for most ordinary people—it appeared unnecessary. ‘Un-heroic, realistic deeds’