with engaging its rulers in debate, or offering radical alternatives to their rule, than in simply getting out from under it. This contributed to the carnival-like aspect of 1989 remarked upon by some observers in Poland and Czechoslovakia; it also contributed to the unconcern with violent retribution. Communism was no longer an obstacle so much as an irrelevance.
This can be seen best in the language in which the objectives of 1989 were commonly expressed. The theme of ‘returning to Europe’ was not new. Long before Communism, the continent’s eastern half had been the Europe that sought recognition and acknowledgement;
But the lament for their lost European identity had acquired special significance for Eastern Europeans in recent years with the emergence in the West of something new: an institutional entity—a ‘European Community’, a ‘European Union’—built around self-consciously ‘European’ values with which East Europeans could all too readily identify: individual rights, civic obligations, the freedom of expression and movement. Talk of ‘Europe’ became less abstract and therefore, among other things, more interesting to young people. No longer just a lament for the lost culture of old Prague or Budapest, it now represented a concrete and attainable set of political goals. The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.
This was more than just a matter of rhetoric. Whereas the old Communist cadres could convincingly (and even with conviction) point to the depredations of an abstraction called ‘capitalism’, they had nothing to offer in place of ‘Europe’—because it represented not an ideological alternative but simply the political norm. Sometimes the thought was inflected as ‘the market economy’, sometimes as ‘civil society’; but in either case ‘Europe’ stood —squarely and simply—for normalcy and the modern way of life. Communism was now no longer the future—its insistent trump card for six decades—but the past.
Naturally, there were variations. Nationalists and even some political and religious conservatives—many of them active and influential in 1989—were not disposed to think so much of Europe as of ‘Poland’ or ‘Hungary’. And some of them were perhaps less interested in freedom and individual rights than others. The immediate priorities of the crowd also varied—the idea of somehow returning to Europe was more important in mobilizing popular sentiment in Czechoslovakia than in Romania, to take an obvious example, where removing a dictator and putting food on the table took precedence. And whereas some of the leaders of 1989 set out from the start to build a market economy (when forming his first government in September 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki memorably declared that he was ‘looking for my Ludwig Erhard!’) others—notably Havel—preferred to focus upon the civic foundations of democracy.
The significance of these nuances would only emerge later. It may be appropriate here, however, to offer an observation concerning the place of the
But it should not be concluded from this, as it sometimes is, that Eastern Europe’s captive peoples were yearning to become… American; much less that it was American encouragement or support that precipitated or facilitated their liberation.[312] The US played a remarkably small part in the dramas of 1989, at least until after the fact. And the American social model itself—the ‘free market’—was only occasionally posited as an object of admiration or emulation by the crowds or their spokesmen. For most people who had lived under Communism, liberation by no means implied a yearning for untrammeled economic competition, much less the loss of free social services, guaranteed employment, cheap rents or any of Communism’s other attendant benefits. It was, after all, one of the attractions of ‘Europe’, as imagined from the East, that it held out the prospect of affluence
Such euro-dreams were harbingers of disappointments to come. But few saw this at the time. In the marketplace of alternative models, the American way of life was still a minority taste and America, for all its global clout, was a long way away. The other superpower, however, was right on the doorstep. The satellite states of eastern Europe were all colonies of the Communist empire based in Moscow. Accordingly, there is only so much about the changes of 1989 that can be attributed to indigenous social or political forces—whether they were underground Catholic organizations in Slovakia, rock-music groups in Poland or free-thinking intellectuals everywhere. In the last analysis, it was always Moscow that counted.
In the heady afterglow of liberation, many East Europeans belittled the significance of Moscow, the better to highlight their own achievement. In January 1992, Democratic Forum’s Jozsef Antall, now prime minister of Hungary, bemoaned to a Hungarian audience the West’s lack of appreciation for Central Europeans’ heroic role in the downfall of communism: ‘This unrequited love must end because we stuck to our posts, we fought our own fights without firing one shot and we won the third world war for them.’ Antall’s embittered account, however flattering to his audience, misses the seminal truth about 1989: if Eastern Europe’s crowds and intellectuals and trade union leaders ‘won the third world war’ it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.
On July 6th 1989, Gorbachev addressed the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and informed his audience that the Soviet Union would not stand in the way of reform in Eastern Europe: that was ‘entirely a matter for the people themselves.’ At a conference of eastern bloc leaders in Bucharest on July 7th 1989, the Soviet leader affirmed each socialist state’s right to follow its own trajectory without external interference. Five months later, in a stateroom on the SS Maxim Gorky off Malta, he assured President Bush that force would not be used to keep Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes in power. There was no ambiguity about his position. Gorbachev, as Michnik had remarked in 1988, was ‘the prisoner of his foreign policy successes.’ Once an imperial metropole had so publicly acknowledged that it would not, could not hang on to its colonial periphery—and had been universally acclaimed for saying so—its colonies were lost and with them the empire’s indigenous collaborators. All that remained to be determined was the manner and direction in which they fell.
The collaborators themselves certainly understood what was happening: between July 1988 and July 1989 Karoly Grosz and Miklos Nemeth, the leading reformers in the Hungarian Party, made four separate visits to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. Their colleague Rezso Nyers also spoke with him in Bucharest on July 7th 1989, the day after Kadar’s death, by which date it was already clear that their cause was lost. Gorbachev did nothing actively to precipitate or encourage the revolutions of 1989: he merely stood aside. In 1849 Russian intervention had sealed the fate of the Hungarian and other revolutions of that year; in 1989 Russian abstention helped assure their success.
Gorbachev did more than just let the colonies go. By indicating that he would not intervene he decisively undermined the only real source of political legitimacy available to the rulers of the satellite states: the promise (or threat) of military intervention from Moscow. Without that threat the local regimes were politically naked. Economically they might have struggled for a few more years, but there, too, the logic of Soviet retreat was implacable: once Moscow started charging world market prices for its exports to Comecon countries (as it did in 1990) the latter, heavily dependent on imperial subsidies, would have collapsed in any event.
As this last example suggests, Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself—just as Stalin had built the satellite regimes not for their own sake but as a security for his western frontier. Tactically Gorbachev miscalculated badly—within two years the lessons of Eastern Europe would be used against the region’s liberator on his home territory. But strategically his achievement was immense and unprecedented. No other territorial empire in recorded history ever abandoned its dominions so rapidly, with such good grace and so little bloodshed. Gorbachev cannot take direct credit for what happened in 1989—he did not plan it and only hazily grasped its long-term import. But he was the permissive and precipitating cause. It was Mr Gorbachev’s revolution.
