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To be fair, the East German dissidents genuinely misread the courage of the crowds in November 1989 as the basis for a renewed socialist republic. On the other hand, the source of that misreading was their blind failure to understand what ‘socialism’ had come to mean—and their own investment in its survival.
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In certain respects its Polish equivalent came in 1980-81—the political transition in Poland a decade later was an altogether more calculated and negotiated affair.
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The author, who was in Prague at this time, can vouch for the intoxicating feeling that history was being made by the hour.
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A cartoon in one of the ephemeral Prague student newspapers of December 1989 perfectly captures the generation gap. A paunchy middle-aged man in an undershirt stares with distaste into his shaving mirror at a blowsy woman in the doorway, a dirty nightgown draped over her shoulders, her hair in rollers, a cigarette dangling from her lips. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ she taunts him. ‘I’m your dream of 1968.’
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‘If a people have never spoken, the first words they utter are poetry.’ Ferdinando Camon in
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At least until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, after which the West had no further use for an anti-Soviet maverick.
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The trial and execution by firing squad were filmed for television, but not shown until two days later.
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Officially, of course, the Turks didn’t exist: ‘There are no Turks in Bulgaria’ (Dimitur Stoyanov, Interior Minister).
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Such considerations did not always apply in remote rural communities and small provincial towns, where the police continued to the very end to operate unhindered by television cameras or public disapproval.
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A backhanded nod to the Sixties’ only lasting monument, the idea that youth is an inherently superior condition—in the words of Jerry Rubin: ‘Never trust anyone over 30.’
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This line of reasoning was developed by Voltaire, among others, and is elegantly explicated by Larry Wolff in
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Even Reagan’s initial response to the declaration of martial law in Poland was distinctly lukewarm. Only after loud public criticism (from Henry Kissinger, among others) did official Washington adopt the hard-line stance for which it became better known.
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In August 1989 the deputy chairman of the Social Democratic Party had criticized the Kohl government for ‘aggravating’ the crisis by welcoming East German refugees who were seeking to come west via the newly opened Hungarian border. However in Berlin (a traditional SPD stronghold) the SPD did much better in the elections of 1990, winning 35 percent of the vote.
