Postwar

percent p.a. There ensued four months of sporadic unofficial contacts between Solidarity and the government, stimulating more public calls for ‘reform’. Drifting helplessly, the authorities oscillated between gestures and threats: replacing ministers, denying any plans for negotiations, promising economic change, threatening to close the Gdansk shipyard. The public’s confidence in the state, such as it was, collapsed.

On December 18th 1988—symptomatically if coincidentally just one week after Gorbachev’s seminal UN speech—a Solidarity ‘Citizens Committee’ was formed in Warsaw to plan for full-scale negotiations with the government. Jaruzelski, his options seemingly exhausted, at last conceded the obvious and forced a somewhat reluctant Central Committee to agree to talks. On February 6th 1989 the Communists officially recognized Solidarity as a negotiating partner and opened ‘round table’ negotiations with its representatives. The talks lasted until April 5th. On that day (once again a week after major Soviet developments, this time the open elections to the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies), all sides agreed to the legalization of independent trade unions, far-reaching economic legislation and, above all, a new elected Assembly.

In hindsight the outcome of the round-table talks was a negotiated termination of Communism in Poland, and at least to some of the participants this much was already clear. But no-one anticipated the speed of the denouement. The elections to be held on June 4th, while allowing an unprecedented element of real choice, were rigged to ensure a Communist majority: voting for the national Senate was to be genuinely open, but in the elections to the Sejm (Parliamentary Assembly) half the seats were reserved for official (i.e. Communist) candidates. And by scheduling the elections so soon, the government hoped to capitalize on the disorganization and inexperience of its opponents.

The results came as a shock to everyone. Backed by Adam Michnik’s impromptu new daily ‘Election Gazette’ (Gazeta Wyborcza), Solidarity won 99/100 seats for the Senate and all the seats it was allowed to contest for the Sejm. Meanwhile only two of the Communist candidates standing for ‘reserved’ seats secured the 50 percent of the vote required to take up their places. Faced with a complete rout and unprecedented public humiliation, the Communist rulers of Poland had the option of ignoring the vote; declaring martial law once again; or else accepting defeat and relinquishing power.

Put thus, the choice was clear—as Gorbachev made quite explicit to Jaruzelski in a private phone conversation, the election must stand. Jaruzelski’s first thought was to secure a face-saving compromise by inviting Solidarity to join him in a coalition government, but this was rebuffed. Instead, after some weeks of further negotiation and unsuccessful Communist efforts to nominate their own prime minister, the Party leadership bowed to the inevitable and on September 12th 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki was approved as post-war Poland’s first non- Communist Prime Minister (although the Communists retained control of certain key ministries).

Meanwhile, in a shrewd political move, the Solidarity parliamentary group simultaneously voted to make Jaruzelski Head of State, effectively co-opting the Communist ‘moderates’ into the ensuing transition and easing their embarrassment. The following month Mazowiecki’s government announced plans to institute a ‘market economy’, presented in a stabilization program—the so-called ‘Balcerowicz Plan’—that was approved by the Sejm on December 28th. One day later, the ‘leading role’ of Poland’s Communist Party was formally excised from the country’s constitution. Within four weeks, on January 27th 1990, the Party itself had been dissolved.

The helter-skelter quality of the last months of Communist Poland should not blind us to the long and quite slow build up that went before. Most of the actors in the drama of 1989—Jaruzelski, Kiszczak, Walesa, Michnik, Mazowiecki—had already been on the stage for many years. The country had passed from a brief flourish of relative liberty in 1981 into martial law, followed by a lengthy, uncertain purgatory of repressive semi-tolerance that finally unraveled in a re-run of the previous decade’s economic crises. For all the strength of the Catholic Church, the countrywide popularity of Solidarity, and the Polish nation’s abiding loathing of its Communist rulers, the latter clung to power for so long that their final fall came as something of a surprise. It had been a long goodbye.

In Poland, martial law and its aftermath revealed the limits and inadequacies of the Party; but while repression solidified the opposition it also made it cautious. In Hungary, a comparable caution was born of very different experience. Two decades of ambiguous tolerance had obscured the precise limits of officially condoned dissent. Hungary, after all, was the Communist state where Hilton opened its first hotel behind the Iron Curtain, in December 1976; where Billy Graham undertook not one but three public tours in the course of the Eighties; and which was visited (and implicitly favored) by two US secretaries of State and Vice- President George Bush in that same decade. By 1988 Communist Hungary had a decidedly ‘good’ image.

Partly for this reason, opposition to Party rule took a long time to emerge into the open. Dissimulation and maneuver seemed the better part of valor, especially to anyone who remembered 1956; and life in Janos Kadar’s Hungary was tolerable, if drab. In reality, the official economy, as we saw in the previous chapter, was in no better condition than that of Poland, despite various reforms and ‘New Economic Mechanisms.’ To be sure, the ‘black’ or parallel economy enabled many people to get by on a standard of living somewhat higher than that of Hungary’s neighbors. But as research by Hungarian social statisticians was already revealing, the country was suffering significant inequalities of income, health and housing; social mobility and welfare were actually behind the West; and the long work hours (many people worked two or even three jobs), high levels of alcoholism and mental disorder, together with the highest suicide rate in eastern Europe, were taking their toll on the population.

There was, then, ample ground for discontent. But there was no organized political opposition. Although some independent organizations surfaced in the course of the 1980s, they were mostly confined to environmental issues or to protests against Romania’s mistreatment of its Hungarian minority—an issue on which they could count on the Communists’ tacit sympathy (which explains official tolerance of the decidedly nationalist Hungarian Democratic Forum, formed in September 1987). Hungary remained a ‘socialist republic’ (as it was officially described in the Constitutional revision of 1972). Dissent and criticism were largely confined within the ruling Party, although in the elections of June 1985 multiple candidacies were permitted for the first time and a handful of officially-approved independents got elected. But it was not until 1988 that serious changes began.

The catalyst for change in Hungary was the frustration of younger, ‘reform’ Communists—openly enthusiastic about the transformations Gorbachev was working in the CPSU—at the inflexibility of their own ageing Party leadership. In May 1988, at a special Communist Conference called for the purpose, they at last succeeded in removing the 76-year-old Kadar from the leadership and replacing him with Karoly Grosz, the Prime Minister. The strictly practical consequences of this internal Party coup were limited to an economic austerity program aimed at strengthening ‘market forces’; but it had great symbolic force.

Janos Kadar had ruled Hungary ever since the revolution of 1956, in whose suppression he played the major part. Despite his rather favorable image abroad, he incarnated for Hungarians the official lie at the heart of ‘goulash Communism’: that the Hungarian reform movement had been nothing but a ‘counter-revolution’. Kadar was also the living embodiment of the conspiracy of silence surrounding Imre Nagy ever since his kidnapping, secret trial and even more secret execution and burial three decades before. [297] The removal of Kadar thus seemed to suggest that something fundamental had shifted in Hungarian public life—an impression confirmed when his successors not only allowed a group of dissident young Communists and others to form Fidesz (Young Democrats), but in November 1988 officially condoned the appearance of independent political parties.

In the early months of 1989 the Communist legislature passed a series of measures recognizing the right of free assembly; officially sanctioning ‘transition’ to a multi-party system; and, in April, formally jettisoning ‘democratic centralism’ in the Party itself. Of even greater moment, Hungary’s Communist rulers—tacitly acknowledging that their Party could not hope to maintain its control of the countryunless it came clean about its past—announced their intention to exhume and rebury the troublesome remains of Imre Nagy. At the same time Imre Pozsgay and other reformers in the Hungarian Politburo convinced their colleagues to open a commission of inquiry into the events of 1956 and officially redefine them: no longer a ‘counter-revolution’, they were now officially a ‘popular uprising against an oligarchic rule that had debased the nation.’

On June 16th 1989—the thirty-first anniversary of his death—the remains of Imre Nagy and four of his colleagues were ceremoniously reburied as national heroes. An estimated 300,000 Hungarians lined the streets, with millions more watching the proceedings live on television. Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orban, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy’s reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution