Russia

The process began in East Germany, where word suddenly began to spread that a new, safe, way of escaping to the West was to take a holiday in Hungary and then cross the frontier into Austria. Hungary had opened its frontier with Austria on 2 May 1989. By 1 July 25,000 people, including many East Germans, were waiting to cross. On 22 August unaccountably lax Czech security allowed crowds of East Germans to occupy the West German embassy in Prague. On 11 September Hungary removed restrictions on all its frontiers, and over the next few days 20,000 East Germans poured across them. By the end of the month thousands were escaping to the West through Czechoslovakia and Poland too. The Polish and Czech governments then urged the East German leader, Erich Honecker, to let would-be migrants leave for the West directly rather than across their frontiers. Late in August he finally agreed to allow those now trapped in West German embassies to leave, though on sealed trains that would travel through East Germany only at night. But security was breached, and on the night of 4 October crowds stormed Dresden railway station trying to board the train as it passed through.

Honecker was about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the regime. On 7 October Gorbachev himself arrived in East Berlin, the guest of honour at the celebrations, and proceeded to rack the pressure up on his host several notches more. The fact that he received a warmer reception than his host from the crowds that turned out to see him was not surprising — Gorbachev was very popular outside the Soviet Union. But the broad hints he dropped to Honecker in public were unexpected. ‘Life punishes those who lag behind the times,’ he warned. As if on cue, large crowds of demonstrators gathered in Leipzig as well as East Berlin, and Honecker was left in no doubt that he should not expect the Soviet troops stationed in his country to save him. On the night of 18/19 October he was abandoned as Party leader and replaced by Egon Krenz, who was responsible for public order and the secret police. The appointment had received Gorbachev’s imprimatur. Honecker himself subsequently attributed his downfall to Gorbachev. ¹⁷

The spotlight moved in quick succession from East Berlin to Prague and back again, and then to Sofia. In Prague, on 28 October, the seventy-first anniversary of the country’s foundation, a patriotic demonstration was held in Wenceslas Square. The police broke it up, and there were no obvious repercussions. A professor at Charles University who passed through Wenceslas Square regularly in the days that followed observed dissident activists trying to drum up support for another demonstration, but people walked on past them, apparently indifferent. ¹⁸ In Berlin, however, excitement rose again when, on 6 November, the East German government finally lifted restrictions on foreign travel. This precipitated a popular craze to leave the country. Sometimes this meant only a few days’ sightseeing in the West; nevertheless, there was a haemorrhage of trained professionals, and health services were soon at the point of breakdown.

Three days after restrictions had been lifted there was fresh excitement when crowds began to tear down the Berlin Wall. On 12 November it was announced that eleven of the twenty-four ministries in East Germany’s government were being allotted to members of non-Communist parties. This accorded with the Kremlin’s latest political line favouring coalition governments, but the fact that Krenz had allowed himself to be overtaken by events did not please Moscow. On 10 November the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, was voted out of office by a majority of one in the Central Committee. His successor, Petar Mladenov, had only just returned from a meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, and the critical vote was thought by some to have been that of Dobri Dzurov, who was reputed to be very close to Moscow.

Circumstantial evidence suggested that the Kremlin was engineering the political changes taking place in the Bloc, and this was shortly to be confirmed in the case of the Czech revolution. The critical incident — recorded on camera — took place in Prague on 17 November, when police apparently attacked demonstrating students, beating one up so badly that he died. This prompted a storm of public outrage and immense crowds bearing banners soon filled Wenceslas Square. The very next day an umbrella opposition movement called Civic Forum headed by Havel was formed, and within ten days there were changes of government and of Party leader, the Party having surrendered its political monopoly. Images of the police killing the student, the inception the Prague Revolution, and the crowd scenes that followed were seen by millions the world over, giving rise to the idea that the people had toppled Communism.