whose praises they were now singing.
This was true. It was a curiosity of the Hungarian exit from Communism that it was conducted by Communists themselves—only in June were round-table talks convened with opposition parties, in conscious imitation of the Polish precedent. This induced a certain skepticism among anti-Communist Hungarians, for whom Nagy’s resurrection, like his earlier execution, was an intra-Party affair of little concern to Communism’s many victims. But it would be wrong to underestimate the symbolic force of the reburial of Nagy. It was an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that the Party and its leadership had lived and taught and imposed a lie.
When Janos Kadar died just three weeks later—on the very day that the Hungarian Supreme Court pronounced Nagy’s full rehabilitation—Hungarian Communism died with him. All that remained was to agree on the formalities of its passing. The ‘leading role’ of the Party was abolished; multi-party elections were scheduled for the following March; and on October 7th the Communists—the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party—re-baptized themselves the Hungarian Socialist Party. On October 23rd Parliament, still overwhelmingly composed of Communist deputies elected under the old Party regime, in turn voted to rename the country itself as, simply, the Hungarian Republic.
The Hungarian ‘revolution’ of 1989 had two distinguishing features. The first, as we have seen, is that it was the only passage from a Communist regime to a genuine multi-party system effected entirely from within. The second point of note is that whereas in Poland, as later in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the events of 1989 were largely self-referential, the Hungarian transition played a vital role in the unraveling of another Communist regime, that of East Germany.
To outside observers, the German Democratic Republic appeared among the least vulnerable of Communist regimes, and not only because it was universally assumed that no Soviet leader would ever allow it to fall. The physical environment of the GDR, notably its cities, might appear tawdry and dilapidated; its security police, the Stasi, were notoriously omnipresent; and the Wall in Berlin remained a moral and aesthetic outrage. But the East German economy was widely believed to be in better shape than that of its socialist neighbors. When First Secretary Erich Honecker boasted at the country’s fortieth anniversary celebrations in October 1989 that the GDR was one of the world’s top ten economic performers, his guest Mikhail Gorbachev was heard to emit an audible snort; but if nothing else, the regime was efficient in the manufacture and export of bogus data: many Western observers took Honecker at his word.
The GDR’s most enthusiastic admirers were to be found in the Federal Republic. The apparent success of
Preoccupied with ‘peace,’ ‘stability,’ and ‘order,’ many West Germans thus ended up sharing the point of view of the Eastern politicians with whom they were doing business. Egon Bahr, a prominent Social Democrat, explained in January 1982 (immediately following the declaration of martial law in Poland) that Germans had renounced their claim to national unity for the sake of peace and the Poles would just have to renounce
In later years it would emerge that on more than one occasion national leaders of the SPD made confidential and decidedly compromising statements to high-ranking East Germans visiting the West. In 1987 Bjorn Engholm praised the domestic policies of the GDR as ‘historic’, while the following year his colleague Oskar Lafontaine promised to do everything in his power to make sure that West German support for East German dissidents remained muted. ‘The Social Democrats,’ he assured his interlocutors, ‘must avoid everything that would mean a strengthening of those forces.’ As a Soviet report to the GDR Politburo noted in October 1984, ‘Many arguments that had previously been presented by us to the representatives of the SPD have now been taken over by them’.[298]
The illusions of West German Social Democrats are perhaps understandable. But they were shared with almost equal fervour by many Christian Democrats too. Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor since 1982, was just as keen as his opponentsto cultivate good relations with the GDR. At the Moscow funeral of Yuri Andropov in February 1984 he met and spoke with Erich Honecker—and did so again at the burial of Chernenko the following year. Agreements were reached between the two sides over cultural exchange and the removal of mines on the inter-German border. In September 1987 Honecker became the first East German leader to visit the Federal Republic. Meanwhile West German subsidies for the GDR continued apace (but no support was ever forthcoming for East Germany’s internal opposition).
Flush with West German sponsorship, confident of Moscow’s backing and at liberty to export to the West its more troublesome dissidents, the East German regime might have survived indefinitely. It certainly appeared immune to change: in June 1987 demonstrators in East Berlin opposed to the Wall and chanting praise for the distant Gorbachev were summarily dispersed. In January 1988 the government did not hesitate to imprison and expel well over a hundred demonstrators who were commemorating the 1919 murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht with signs quoting Luxemburg herself: ‘Freedom is also the freedom of those who think differently’. In September 1988 Honecker, on a visit to Moscow, publicly praised Gorbachev’s
Notwithstanding the unprecedented developments then unfolding in Moscow, Warsaw and Budapest, the East German Communists were still rigging votes in a manner familiar from the 1950s. In May 1989 the official outcome of the GDR municipal elections—98.85 percent for government candidates—was so egregiously fabricated that it aroused nationwide protests from priests, environmental groups and even critics within the ruling party. The Politburo studiously ignored them. But now, for the first time, East Germans had a choice. They no longer had to accept the status quo, risk arrest or else essay a hazardous escape to the West. On May 2nd 1989, in the course of relaxing the control of movement and expression within Hungary itself, the authorities in Budapest had removed the electrified fence along the country’s western frontier, although the border itself remained formally closed.
East Germans began to swarm into Hungary. By July 1st 1989 some 25,000 of them had made their way to ‘vacation’ there. Thousands more followed, many of them seeking temporary refuge in West German embassies in Prague and Budapest. A few made their way across the still-closed Austro-Hungarian frontier without being stopped by border guards, but most just stayed in Hungary. By early September there were 60,000 GDR citizens in Hungary, waiting. Asked on a Hungarian television news program on September 10th what his government’s response would be if some of these people started walking west, the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn replied: ‘We will allow them through without any further ado and I assume that the Austrians will let them in.’ The door to the West was officially open: within seventy-two hours some 22,000 East Germans had rushed through it.
The East German authorities protested furiously—the Hungarian move implied a breach of the longstanding agreement between Communist governments not to allow their countries to be used as escape routes from fraternal neighbors. But the authorities in Budapest merely insisted that they were bound by their signature to the Helsinki Final Act. The people took them at their word. In the course of the next three weeks the GDR authorities confronted a public-relations disaster as tens of thousands of their fellow citizens tried to get out through the new exit route.
In an attempt to take control of events the GDR rulers offered East German refugees in the embassies in Prague and Warsaw safe passage back through their own country and on to West Germany in a sealed train. This, however, merely exacerbated the regime’s mounting humiliation: as the train passed through the GDR it was greeted by tens of thousands of cheering, envious locals. An estimated five thousand people tried to clamber aboard when the refugee train stopped briefly in Dresden; when the police beat them back a riot ensued—all under the eyes of the world’s media.
The regime’s travails emboldened its critics. The day after Hungary opened its borders a group of East
