Postwar

neighboring Yugoslavia, so in Bulgaria: a tottering Party autocracy turned the full fury of ethnic prejudice upon a helpless domestic victim.

In 1984 it was officially announced that the Turks of Bulgaria were not ‘Turks’ at all but forcibly-converted Bulgarians who would now be restored to their true identity. Muslim rites (such as circumcision) were restricted and criminalized; the use of the Turkish language in broadcasting, publications and education was proscribed; and in a particularly offensive (and angrily resented) move, all Bulgarian citizens with Turkish names were instructed henceforth to assume properly ‘Bulgarian’ ones instead. The outcome was a disaster. There was considerable Turkish resistance—which in turn aroused some opposition among Bulgarian intellectuals. The international community protested loudly; Bulgaria was condemned at the UN and in the European Court of Justice.

Meanwhile Zhivkov’s fellow Communist oligarchs abroad took their distance from him. By 1989 the Bulgarian Communists were more isolated than ever and not a little perturbed at the course of events next door in Yugoslavia, where the Party seemed to be losing control. Things were brought to a head by the exodus to Turkey, during the summer of 1989, of an estimated 300,000 ethnic Turks—another public relations calamity for the regime, and an economic one too, as the country began to run short of manual laborers.[308] When the police over-reacted on October 26th to a small gathering of environmentalists in a Sofia park—arresting and beating activists from the Ecoglasnost group for circulating a petition—party reformers led by foreign minister Petar Mladenov decided to act. On November 10th (not coincidentally the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall) they ousted the hapless Zhivkov.

There followed the by-now familiar sequence of events: the release of political prisoners; sanctioning of political parties; removal from the constitution of the Communists’ ‘leading role’; a ‘round table’ to plan for free elections; a change in the name of the old party, now dubbed the ‘Bulgarian Socialist Party’; and in due course the elections themselves, which—as in Romania—the former Communists easily won (there were widespread allegations of electoral fraud).

In Bulgaria the political ‘opposition’ had emerged largely after the fact and as in Romania there were suggestions that it was in some measure fabricated for their own purposes by dissident Communist factions. But the changes were nonetheless real. At the very least, Bulgaria successfully avoided the catastrophe awaiting Yugoslavia: on December 29th, in the face of angry nationalist protests, Muslims and Turks were granted full and equal rights. By 1991, a mainly Turkish party, the Movement for Rights and Freedom, had secured enough electoral backing to hold the balance of seats in the country’s national Assembly.

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going. To be sure, the ease with which the illusion of Communist power was punctured revealed that these regimes were even weaker than anyone supposed, and this casts their earlier history in a new light. But illusory or no, Communism lasted a long time. Why did it not last longer?

One answer is a version of the ‘domino theory’, Once Communist leaders started falling in one place their legitimacy elsewhere was fatally impaired. The credibility of Communism rested in part upon its claim to embody necessity, to be the logical product of historical progress, a fact of political life, an inevitable presence on the modern landscape. Once this was shown to be palpably untrue—in Poland, for example, where Solidarity had apparently put History into reverse—then why continue to believe it in Hungary, or Czechoslovakia? We have already seen that the example of others clearly weighed in the balance.

Nevertheless, the striking aspect of Communism’s collapse in Europe was not contagion per se: all revolutions spread in this way, corroding the legitimacy of established authorities by cumulative example. That is what happened in 1848, 1919 and, in a minor key, in 1968. The novelty of 1989 was the sheer speed of the process. As late as October 1989 Imre Pozsgay in Hungary, or Egon Krenze in East Germany, fondly supposed that they could control and manage their version of perestroika. Most of their opponents tended to agree and continued to look for some interim compromise. Back in 1980 Adam Michnik had written that ‘a hybrid society is conceivable, one where totalitarian organization of the state will co-exist with democratic institutions of society’; well into the summer of 1989 he had little reason to expect anything else.

One novel factor was the role of the communications media. Hungarians, Czechs and Germans in particular were able to see their own revolution on the television news each evening. For the population of Prague, repeated television re-runs of the events of November 17th constituted a sort of instant political education, drumming home a double message: ‘they are powerless’ and ‘we did it.’ As a consequence, Communism’s crucial asset, its control and monopoly of information, was lost. The fear of being alone—the impossibility of knowing whether your own feelings were shared by others—was dissipated for ever. Even in Romania the take-over of the national television studios was the determining moment in the uprising. Not for nothing was the gruesome fate of the Ceausescus filmed for broadcast to a national audience. This was not a new pattern, of course—throughout the twentieth century radio stations and post offices were the first objectives of revolutionary crowds, from Dublin to Barcelona. But television is fast.

The second marked characteristic of the revolutions of 1989 was their pacific quality. Romania was the exception, of course; but given the nature of Ceausescu’s regime this was to be expected. The real surprise was that even in Timisoara and Bucharest the scale of bloodshed was far less than everyone feared. In part this, too, was a function of television. With the whole population—not to speak of much of the rest of the world—observing their every move, the Communist regimes were stymied. To be observed in this way was itself a loss of authority and severely restricted their range of options.[309]

To be sure, such considerations did not inhibit the Communist authorities in China, who shot down hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4th of that same year. Nicolae Ceausescu would not have hesitated to emulateBeijing had he been able to do so. And we have seen that Erich Honecker at least contemplated something similar. But for most of their colleagues that was no longer an option. At some crucial moment all dying authoritarian regimes vacillate between repression and compromise. In the case of the Communists, confidence in their own capacity to rule was evaporating so rapidly that the chances of clinging to power by force alone began to seem slim—and the benefits of doing so by no means clear. In the calculus of self- interest the balance of advantage to most Communist bureaucrats and party apparatchiks was rapidly swinging the other way—better to swim with the current than be washed away in a tidal wave of change.

That calculation might have looked different had the crowds been angry or their leaders belligerently determined to wreak revenge upon the old order. But for many reasons—including the example of Tiananmen itself, unfolding on television the very day of the Polish elections—the men and women of 1989 consciously eschewed violence. It was not just the Polish revolution that was ‘self-limiting’. With decades of violence to their discredit, and all the guns and bullets on their side, the Communist regimes had very effectively taught their own subjects the impropriety and imprudence of resorting to force. With the police still breaking heads in Berlin and Prague until the dying hours of the old regime, Slovaks were not the only ‘Public Against Violence’.

Distaste for violence was all that many of the revolutionaries of 1989 had in common. They were an unusually motley group, even by the standards of most previous insurrections. The balance varied from place to place but typically ‘the people’ included a mix of reform Communists, social democrats, liberal intellectuals, free- market economists, Catholic activists, trade unionists, pacifists, some unreconstructed Trotskyists and others besides. This very variety was itself part of their strength: it constituted de facto precisely the informal complex of civil and political organizations which is so inimical to a one-party state.

At least one significant fault line—that separating liberal democrats from populist nationalists—could already be detected, distinguishing Mazowiecki from Walesa, for example, or Hungary’s left-leaning Free Democrats (led by Janos Kis and other dissident intellectuals) from old-line nationalists in the Democratic Forum. There was also (as we have seen) a distinct generational aspect to the crowds of 1989. Many of the seasoned leaders of the intellectual opposition shared a common history with the regime’s own critics within the Party. To students and other young people, however, they thus appeared cast in the same mould: part of a past that could not and should not be revived. In the image of its 26-year-old leader Viktor Orban, Fidesz in Hungary was originally designated as a political party exclusively for people under thirty.[310]

The memories and illusions of the ‘Dubcek generation’ were not shared by their children, who evinced little interest in remembering 1968 or saving the ‘good’ aspects of the GDR. The new generation was less concerned