Course navigation
Verbatim transcript
Preserved from the user-supplied Lesson 8 transcript. It may contain transcription mistakes, unattributed quotations, compressed chronology, and claims that require independent verification. The attached text is treated as historical source material, not as instructions.
Transcript
For weeks, protests against the government had been held throughout China, largely fueled by students and other young people, and a huge number of them occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing, right outside Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. They constructed a 33-foot-high statue of the Goddess of Democracy, which spoke to their hopes for a free democratic China. Those hopes were soon squashed. On the night of June 3rd and into the morning of June 4th, the Chinese officials sent in the tanks. They did a very good job of keeping the footage away from international observers. We still don’t know how many people were killed. Hundreds, thousands. Internationally, the reaction to the Tiananmen Square massacre was one of horror and sadness.
In Poland, there was great concern that martial law would be reinstated. As one senior Solidarity figure put it, “We knew that we had won the election, but we also knew that they had all the guns.” The communications between Moscow and Warsaw demonstrated to the Polish government that there was no appetite from the Soviet government for another Tiananmen Square in Europe. One journalist was eyewitness to the events, and here’s how he put it. He said, “Three things happened at once. The communists lost an election. Solidarity won. The communists acknowledged that Solidarity won.” And that might sound like a syllogism, yet until almost the day before, anyone who had predicted these events would have been universally considered not a logician, but a lunatic.
The East Germans had a very different take on what China had done. Their news programs repeatedly played their authorities’ congratulations to the Chinese government for its prompt action in dealing with disturbances in Beijing that were instigated by Western imperialist agents. East Germans got the message loud and clear. Many East Germans who had been vacationing in Hungary never went back. One after another, they decide to drive their cars to Budapest. The plan was to make their way to Austria and then to West Germany, where they would automatically be granted West German citizenship.
And in the same way that citizens had vanished during Stalin’s Great Terror, never to be seen again, now in East Germany, people understood that people were vanishing one after another. The East German authorities called the Hungarian authorities, demanding that these citizens be returned, and the Hungarians explicitly refused. Hungary regarded them as refugees, and at one point, there were 85,000 East Germans on Hungarian soil. Honecker was apoplectic, and even more so when Gorbachev refused to intervene. He was told he had to settle the matter with the Hungarians by himself.
And now Hungary further liberalized. They promised to allow the exhumation, identification, and burial of Imre Nagy’s remains, which had long been hidden to keep his grave from becoming a shrine. And the government officially changed their position on what had happened in Hungary in 1956. It was no longer called a counterrevolution, but it was now called a popular uprising. On June 16, 1989, Nagy and his four closest associates finally got an official funeral. There was a sixth coffin alongside theirs to represent the unknown insurgents, all those other Hungarians, many of whom are anonymous, who gave their lives in a failed effort to liberate the country from Soviet rule. Audio of one of his speeches was broadcast over the loudspeakers at Hero Square in Budapest, and 200,000 Hungarians came out to pay their respects, to lay flowers on top of the coffins of those who had given all.
Ten days after Nagy’s funeral, the head of Hungary ceded power to a Presidium of himself and three other men. The dam broke swiftly and decisively for what had been the most liberal of the Warsaw Pact nations. Honecker of East Germany, Ceausescu of Romania, were beside themselves. They demanded that Gorbachev intervene in both Poland and Hungary. His answer was unambiguous. He told them, “Those who are afraid had better hold on because perestroika has only just begun.” And in fact, he said, “Ceausescu is only worried for his own skin.”
Honecker could do nothing, for his own life was in the balance. He was in Romania on June 8th, 1989. And after he gave a speech about the dangers facing communism, he grabbed his side and collapsed in extreme pain. When he returned to Berlin, it turned out that he had gall bladder cancer. Now, the ultra-centralized East German government was paralyzed as Honecker recuperated, and East German officials sat on their hands as matters continued to grow out of their control. No one wanted to be seen as assuming responsibility, which would be seen as undermining Honecker’s rule.
Hungary further went full throttle on liberalization. On August 19th, 1989, they announced that the border between Austria and Hungary would be temporarily opened, exactly where the electrified fence between the two nations had been taken down. A ceremonial gate would be constructed. Its doors opened with delegations from both Hungary and Austria crossing the border to demonstrate a show of support for the concept of freedom of movement between nations.
Word got out to the refugees to make their way to the town, Sopron, and both the Austrian Red Cross and the Austrian authorities made preparations to receive an influx of those East Germans who had been in Hungary. Behind the scenes, the Hungarian authorities told their guards to stand down, should any refugee try to make their way to Austria that day. The head of the border guard explicitly told his officers to order the refugees to turn back, but to do absolutely nothing to prevent them from doing so. About 2,000 refugees crossed from Hungary to Austria that day in complete disbelief that this wasn’t all some big communist trick.
Those East Germans who remained in Budapest swarmed the West German consulate, trying to get West German passports. Refugee centers were set up throughout Hungary to service the needs of those East Germans making their way west. The East Germans demanded to send planes and trains to repatriate their refugees, but the requests were immediately dismissed by Hungarian officials. At a certain point, the East Germans could no longer ignore the number of missing people, not entirely, and they denounced the refugees as either political illiterates or criminals, but no one listened.
The contrary news reports from the West about what had happened to the refugees were incessant. Word of their fate spread throughout East Germany. By and large, what mattered to the East Germans was how their former countrymen were being treated in what became known as the Exodus. In fact, Eduard Shevardnadze, who was the Soviet foreign minister, told the GDR to allow for emigration. And he told the German foreign minister, “It will not be bad and will ease your economic burdens.” On August 24th, 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki was inaugurated as the Prime Minister of Poland. Within less than a year, the communists in Poland went from controlling every aspect of Polish society, all the seats in Parliament, all the guns, to nonexistence. The Polish United Workers Party officially dissolved itself in January of 1990, and the communists never again regained a foothold on power in Poland.
As for Hungary, their version of the roundtable talks were held around a triangular table, but the results were even more dramatic. The ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers Party rebranded itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party and eventually became the main center left party in Hungarian politics. In 1998, a young man who had been prominent in those protests by the name of Viktor Orbán was elected Prime Minister at the age of 35. He left office at the end of his first term but returned in 2010 through to this day as Prime Minister of Hungary. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the Poles and the Hungarians were thus liberated in two ways, gradually and then suddenly. But they were not the only ones.
On August 25th, 1989, the day after Mazoweicki became Poland’s Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of Hungary secretly flew to West Germany to meet with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He said, “We have decided to allow the GDR citizens to leave freely, mainly on humanitarian grounds,” and warned him that “you may have to deal with 100,000 or even 150,000 new citizens arriving very quickly.” The West Germans were skeptical. They were happy to keep the matter quiet from the East Germans. But here was the proof that, given the choice, the people of Germany would prefer the liberal West to the Communist East, to the numbers of hundreds of thousands, even at the risk of losing all their belongings and what had been their past lives.
And that left the elephant in the room, the Soviet Union. Did the Russians know? How would they react? Helmut Kohl was not taking any chances. He’d been drafted by the Nazis at the age of 15 at the end of World War II, and he had avoided combat, but he remembered what the Russians had done to Germany. He called Gorbachev to make sure there would be no escalation of tensions if this plan came to fruition. And all Gorbachev said was, “Hungarians are good people,” which was Gorbachev’s code to endorse what was going on. And now they had to let the East Germans know.
The East Germans insisted that if the refugees were returned to East Germany, they would not be punished, but the Hungarians didn’t believe them. And more importantly, neither did the refugees. The East Germans were livid. They wrote to Budapest. They wrote to Moscow. They tried to rally all those Warsaw Pact leaders who had invaded Czechoslovakia to do something about Hungary. But the Poles said no, and the Russians couldn’t care less. The head of the Stasi insisted that “Hungary is betraying socialism,” and he wasn’t entirely wrong. On September 10th, 1989, all border controls were lifted in Hungary. Within three days, over 18,000 East Germans made their way west, assisted by buses provided by the West German government.
It was clear that a crack had formed in the totalitarian power of the East German regime, and the East German population intended to make the most of it. On the month of September, 1989, demonstrations began to coalesce in Leipzig, East Germany’s second largest city. They would meet at St. Nicholas’s Church, an 800-year-old church. They lit candles every Monday evening, and they began to march. Soon, thousands joined, if only because there’s so little else for them to do. The head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, insisted that East Germany have its own Tiananmen Square. He said that Chinese comrades must be lauded because they were able to spot the protest before the situation got out of hand and said, “The situation here is comparable and must be countered by all means and methods.” On September 18, 1989, there were 15,000 marchers in Leipzig. The Stasi arrested 100 of them, running over others as they sped away. But that did little to stop the masses and did much to further alienate the population from the regime.
Now, in between East Germany and Hungary, both geographically and politically, stood Czechoslovakia. The head of Czechoslovakia, Milos Jakes, had closed his border with East Germany to make it more difficult for the East Germans to use his country as a halfway house between Hungary and then the West. But now he had a problem with all those East Germans who remained in Prague. They overwhelmed the West German embassy, and something had to give.
From his hospital bed, Honecker had an idea that was so bizarre and out of touch that only a government official could have conceived of it. He cut a deal with the Czechoslovakian authorities and the West Germans to allow those refugees to emigrate. Here was their condition. They had to return to East Germany in order to travel west, and they had to hand in their ID cards and lose their East German citizenship in the process. So the migrants were very confused. It had to be a trap, but if it was a trap, what’s the catch? So they’d give up their East German citizenship and they’d get West German citizenship and a passport, and the only cost is that Honecker considers them a traitor? It took the West German some efforts to persuade the refugees to trust them. And soon, in an almost perfect inversion of World War II, train cars packed full of refugees began to be deported from East Germany. Except in this case, they were making their way West into freedom.
After that, thousands more began to drive to Czechoslovakia, and the timing couldn’t have been worse for Honecker. October 7th, 1989, was the date of a massive nationwide event to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the GDR. Part of the event featured a visit from Gorbachev, and the Soviet leader did not mince words. He insisted that “life punishes those who fall behind,” which was clearly a slap at Honecker, who could only sit there and bite his tongue. As the procession passed where the leader sat, Gorbachev, who could not speak German very well, still heard what the people were saying, “Gorby, help us. Help us.”
There were still almost 400,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany. The evening after Gorbachev left, their commander received a phone call with orders from the Soviet ambassador. “Do not interfere in any way with internal GDR developments. Let them take their course.” When they double-checked with Moscow, they got a confirmation of these orders. Regardless of what was to happen in East Germany, the Russians would be on the side of peace. That same day, demonstrations erupted throughout East Germany as the citizens realized that Gorbachev was on their side and not on the side of Honecker’s, and that the authority’s strength was decreasing.
Over a thousand people were arrested the following day in Berlin alone, many beaten by the Stasi, both publicly and behind closed doors. But what’s a thousand people in a nation of over 16 million? The following night, matters reached a peak. On October 9th, 1989, there were 8,000 people at St. Nicholas’s Church alone, far too many to fit inside. The Stasi were ready for them, and so were members of the military. Bloodshed was not just a possibility, but a promise. As one Communist Party newspaper put it, “We will fight these enemies of our country, if necessary, with arms.”
The army was stationed on the route of the demonstration. The young men were handed pistols and plenty of ammunition. Many of these soldiers burst into tears because they knew that their wives or their parents or their siblings were marching that night, some with their children, and they knew what those guns could do to those people. If they warned their families to what end, if it wasn’t their own mother who would be shot, it would be somebody else’s. Here’s an example of people who were marching. She’s holding a sign that says, “Reform for our schools,” with smiley faces. They were given orders to shoot her or her dad from under her. Those soldiers had enlisted to protect their country, and now were being asked to murder families for walking down the street.
By five o’clock, there were 70,000 protesters outside the church. Local party officials called Berlin, hoping for a peaceful resolution. Finally, the second secretary of the party district leadership made the call. He said there would be no force used. He got Honecker’s second-in-command, Egon Krenz, on the phone, got him to agree. And all government forces in Leipzig were told to take no active action against persons if there were no anti-state activities and attacks against security forces, objects, or facilities. And so the Leipzigers lit their candles and marched. They held up signs insisting that they wanted peaceful change.
The Stasi had spent decades infiltrating protest groups, but the East Germans had spent decades learning their Stasi tricks. And when Stasi officers in plain clothes broke their cover and tried to pull people’s signs away, they were swiftly surrounded by the crowd, and the chant was steady and the same. “We are the people. No violence.” It was the largest protest East Germany had ever seen. Footage of the march was aired on Western television, and swiftly all of East Germany was aware of what was going on and how nothing was being done to stop it. Leipzig earned the nickname of “Heldenstadt”, Hero City.
Now the politicians began to speak up. Leipzig’s mayor asked for dialogue, and so did the mayor of Dresden, which sat just by the border with Czechoslovakia. Many in the party leadership knew that change was necessary. Things could have swiftly gotten out of control. And another Tiananmen Square massacre was right around the corner as long as Honecker was in charge. A quiet revolt was organized behind the cancerous man’s back. The following Monday, October 16th, over 120,000 people came out to protest. The ones who had been afraid, understandably, had now seen for themselves that no one had been harmed the previous week, neither by the Stasi nor the military. The chants were the same as the week prior. “We are the people, no violence.” But now there was a new chant, “Down with the wall.”
Honecker sat there with his men and just muttered the same thing over and over. Now, surely something has to be done. Something has to be done. Surely something has to be done. That’s Honecker on the left. Among them in the room was Colonel General Fritz Streletz. Streletz is Russian for shooter, by the way. He was chief of staff of the military, and he was no weakling and no dove, to put it mildly. He had been a member of the Nazi Wehrmacht. He had spent three years as a Soviet prisoner after World War II. He was and remained a committed communist. Streletz looked at Honecker and as tactfully as possible, told the East German ruler to go fuck himself. “We can’t do anything,” Streletz said. “We will let the whole matter take its course peacefully.”
The next morning, the East German Communist Party leadership had a meeting. The Prime Minister interjected as soon as everyone was called to order, and he said, “I suggest a new first item be placed on the agenda. It is the release of Erich Honecker from his duties as general secretary and the election of Egon Krenz in his place.” Honecker did not react. There was no precedent for this. It caught him entirely by surprise. He couldn’t simply ignore the request, so he turned to those he regarded as his most loyal allies in the room, but Honecker had no allies left. One by one, as they had secretly planned, all the men took turns using their words to denounce him, stabbing him not in the back, but in the front.
The vote was unanimous because Honecker, being a good communist, accepted the decision of the collective and voted against himself as well. After he left party headquarters, he phoned the Soviet ambassador, let him know the news, and then he called Margot to tell her as well. She herself would be sacked as education minister a few weeks later. If you remember that Russian joke I’d said about “blame everything on my predecessor,” the East Germans thought, “OK, if we sacrifice Honecker to the masses, they would have a honeymoon period under Krenz’s leadership.” In this, they were as out of touch as Honecker had grown. After all, Krenz had been shown repeatedly on East German television, shaking hands with the Chinese leadership after Tiananmen Square.
The week after Honecker’s ouster, over one million East Germans took to the streets in continued protests. On November 1st, Egon Krenz flew to Moscow to me with Gorbachev, who just regarded him as the second Honecker. Krenz had two items on his agenda. First, he learned that the GDR’s finances were complete disasters. A majority of the machines being used industrially were write-offs, meaning the cost to repair them outweighed any benefit. Worse, East Germany was days away from defaulting on interest payments on foreign loans. When that happened, getting further credit would be close to impossible, and economic collapse virtually certain.
Would the Soviet Union please help bail them out? And Krenz said, after all, “the GDR is in a sense the child of the Soviet Union and one must acknowledge paternity of one’s children.” Gorbachev refused and instead argued for more reforms, just as he’d been pushing in the USSR. And now, Krenz turned to threats. He pointed out that if what was happening in Leipzig hit Berlin, it would be possible the Berliners might storm the Berlin Wall itself. That would be awful because then the police would have to intervene, and “certain elements of a state of emergency would have to be introduced.” He was threatening Gorbachev with unleashing the power of the East German state against his own people. Gorbachev was disgusted and sent Krenz back to Berlin empty-handed. He sent a memo to the heads of the Soviet forces stationed in the GDR, reminding them to do absolutely nothing to intervene if matters took a turn for the worse.
Three days later, Krenz’s prediction to Gorbachev came true. Over 700,000 Berliners took to the streets under the slogan of “We are the people.” The propaganda chief, Gunter Schabowski, took to the platform in a show of support for the crowds. They booed him off the stage. On November 8th, Helmut Kohl, chancellor of West Germany, met with Lech Walesa in Poland to discuss the ongoing situation throughout Central Europe. Walesa told him, “You know, the wall will come down soon. I don’t know when, but I really think very soon, maybe weeks.” And Helmut Kohl laughed in his face. He said, “You’re young and don’t understand some things.” There are long historical process is going on, and this will take many years. Both of the men were wrong.
The imagery of thousands of citizens camped out as refugees had been enormously humiliating to East Germany’s international prestige. And now the new East German government tried a new approach to try to control those citizens who were trying to flee. They decided they would be allowed to emigrate if they asked for permission while on East German soil. That way the authorities would at least have some measure of control over the whole mess, and maybe they’d be able to hide the extent of the situation from the outside world.
And on November 9th, Schabowski, who was the propaganda chief, held his daily press conference. After an hour of talking with the press, he said there was time for one more question. Now, word had gotten around there would be new travel regulations, and he was prepared for this. He spoke about Krenz right before the press conference, and Krenz had even given him a copy of the decree that was going to be announced to look over. As he explained, “We have decided today to implement a regulation that allows every citizen in the German Democratic Republic to leave the GDR through any of their border crossings.” He didn’t notice the sentence on the back of the paper, embargoing the information until the following morning. He said, “That comes into effect, according to my information, immediately without delay.”
And one journalist asked, “Does this also apply for West Berlin?” He shrugged, looked back at his papers, and reread a key passage. “Permanent exit can take place via all border crossings from the GDR to the FRG and West Berlin, respectively.” In other words, the propaganda chief of East Germany announced live on camera that East Berliners were free to leave to West Berlin without any fear of repercussion. Not only did he announce it, but he repeated it for good measure. The Berlin Wall was effectively now just a concrete structure.
The East German broadcast of the press conference began at 7:30, and the East Berliners began to storm the wall immediately thereafter. The guards had heard the rumors and were left unsure of what to do. “Open the gate,” people chanted. “The wall must go.” For the first time in their lives, the East German citizens felt comfortable arguing with the soldiers and the Stasi officials, and they were safe to do so. Later that night, all six East Berlin border checkpoints were mobbed with 20,000 people at the Bornholmer-Strasse checkpoint alone. The border guard commander stationed there made a professional assessment of the situation. All he was thinking about was how to avoid bloodshed. If a panic started, people would have been crushed. Yes, we all had pistols. What if one of my men lost his nerve in the mess? He ordered his men to open the gate.
One hour later, unaware of what had happened at the other crossing point, the border guard commander at Checkpoint Charlie came to the same decision. The citizens of East Germany were greeted in West Berlin with flowers and champagne by their fellow Germans. By midnight, all six checkpoints on the Berlin Wall were wide open. All 12,000 border guards were sent back to their barracks. The entire world watched in shock as residents of a united Berlin were literally dancing on top of the Berlin Wall.
Helmut Kohl cut his trip to Poland short. He said, “I’m at the wrong party,” and flew back to Germany. No one even thought to phone Moscow until 5 in the morning, and even then, no one bothered to tell Gorbachev. He woke up the following morning to scenes that seemed unimaginable the day prior. He called Krenz to give his consent after the fact. He said, “You made the right decision because how can you shoot Germans who walk across the border to meet other Germans?”
Now, in between Hungary and East Germany was Czechoslovakia, but the Communist Party leader there, Milos Jakes, intended to stay the course. He told his comrades that as long as the economy holds up, we’ll be all right. But there was one problem, the 50th anniversary of the murder of Jan Opletal. Opletal was a 24-year-old medical student shot by the Nazis for protesting their occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the communists had made him into a martyr in the decades following World War II. The anniversary march took place as planned on Friday, November 17th, 1989, eight days after the Berlin Wall was opened. The crowd held banners denouncing communism and commemorating the Prague uprising of 1968, but the police did nothing.
When the march ended, the crowd dispersed, except for a group of mostly students who made their way to Prague’s historic Wenceslas Square. As they approached the square, they found their way blocked by riot police and anti-terrorist squads who had their batons ready. The protesters gave the police their flowers, and they gave them their candles. They sat down in the street, chanting, “We have no weapons,” and they sang songs. Then another group of police came up behind them. They were trapped on the street for 2 hours, singing songs in the freezing cold. When asked if they could go home, the police said nothing. At 9 PM, a riot squad van arrived and began ramming into them. And that’s when the police began their beating. Over 500 people were injured, men, women, and children alike, and the 120 who were arrested were thereupon beaten again. Supposedly, there was one casualty, and the lesson of Jan Opletal was that the life of one student can make an enormous difference.
Rumors in communist nations were often more truthful than any official media source, and the story got out that the police had murdered a young student by the name of Martin Schmidt. It was reported as truth by foreign media outlets. In fact, there were two students by the name Martin Schmidt who were studying at Prague’s Charles University at the time, and the government swiftly produced them to demonstrate that they were safe and unharmed. After four decades of communist rule, the authorities were actually telling the truth. After four decades of communist rule, no one believed them.
Now that the authorities had chosen violence, everything was on the table. That weekend saw demonstrations that hadn’t been seen in Prague since 1968, with the spot where the police had beaten the protesters taking on the form of a shrine. Students were now joined by every type of citizen, and all the government could think to do in response was to arrest the activists who spread the rumor that Schmidt had been killed. Czechoslovakia’s answer to Lech Walesa was Václav Havel. He was a dissident figurehead who fought authorities for decades while getting arrested and released. He was a playwright, but his career was destroyed due to his support of the Prague Spring. His works were banned in Czechoslovakia, and he himself was forbidden from leaving the country.
He suspected that the end of the Berlin Wall meant that things would swiftly change in Czechoslovakia, and he returned to Prague from the countryside to take part in the drama. Havel organized at a theater with the fortuitous name of the Magic Lantern. The protesters called themselves the Civic Forum, and they presented themselves as spokesmen for the people, and they issued four demands—the resignation of the leaders who had crushed the Prague Spring, the resignation of the ministers who had ordered the attacks on the students, an independent inquiry into recent events, and the immediate release of all political prisoners.
The protest grew and continued over the following days. The energy was felt in every segment of the country. Actors went on strike. So did football players. The Monday alone after police violence saw 300,000 protesters. A new symbol of defiance arose. People in the crowds held up their keys and shook them in the air, telling the communists to pack their shit and go home. The Magic Lantern became a beacon to a huge swath of ideologies who had one thing in common, freeing Czechoslovakia from communist rule. It was a revolution, but a soft and peaceful one, and it became known as the Velvet Revolution for just that reason.
The authorities considered sending in the tanks, not the Russian ones, but their own. On Wednesday, November 22nd, they decided to call out the People’s Militia. But there was one problem. The People’s Militia refused to take up arms against their countrymen, especially the students. That was enough for the defense minister. He went on television that very evening and let the citizens know the army would not fight them. Havel had joked that it was time for another Russian invasion, but expected this time the Russians would be on the sides of the people. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Gorbachev dispatched the head of the party’s international department to Prague to see what was going on. He went directly to the Magic Lantern and met with the Civic Forum himself. And the Soviet embassy also received a delegation from the Civic Forum. These were signals that the Russians regarded the organization as a legitimate, respectable political force in Czechoslovakia. The government tried to censor the images from the news, but there was too much foreign coverage to keep the information from the public. How can you sweep such a story under the rug when hundreds of thousands of people are demonstrating in freezing cold weather?
Friday evening, a week after it all started, Alexander Dubcek, who had been leader of the Prague Spring in 1968, appeared alongside Havel on a balcony in Wenceslas Square, in front of an audience of half a million people. It was as if Martin Luther King had reappeared in Washington, DC, and began to sing We Shall Overcome. The spirit of 1968 was alive and well in Prague. One hour later, both men held a press conference at the Magic Lantern, and that’s when the news broke across the entire country. The communist party leaders were resigning.
As one journalist joked to Havel, “In Poland, it took 10 years. In Hungary, 10 months. In East Germany, 10 weeks. In Czechoslovakia, it will take 10 days.” Ten days had been a ridiculously optimistic estimate, and it turned out an overly conservative one. Instead of taking 10 days, it had taken seven. As a test, the Civic Forum called the nationwide general strike for Monday the 27th. The strike was to last two hours, but it would clearly demonstrate who was on which side. It was instantly clear, just as it had been in Poland with that vote, that virtually all the workers were on the side of the protesters and against the communists. In fact, the television anchor who delivered news of the strike simultaneously announced that he was joining it.
The Communist Party officially abandoned power the next day. By the end of 1989, Havel would be sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia, and Dubcek would be chairman of the Parliament. Additionally, all five of the Warsaw Pact Nations who had taken part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia officially renounced and condemned their past actions. The Velvet Revolution ended in forgiveness and peace. By 1992, the Czech and Slovak peoples would come to realize they preferred to go their own way, and the Velvet Revolution gave way to the Velvet Divorce. After some intense negotiations, the country Czechoslovakia was dissolved at the end of 1992 and birthed the nations of Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
But as Czechoslovakia chose to separate, the two Germanies chose to reunify. The Berlin Wall had been a political dam, and when it fell, the fortunes of the East German Communist Party fell with it. Egon Krenz only managed to last 46 days in office, as decades of hatred for the East German government spilled out into the open without fear of repercussions. By the end, the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, was reduced to being openly booed in parliament, an 81-year-old dinosaur blubbering, “I love you all. I love all human beings.”
The Stasi went from absolute power to absolute impotence. On December 4th, 1989, the protesters took the Stasi building. The guards asked to see their papers as they entered the building, and the protesters complied before seizing and occupying it, sitting nervously in the hallways of the agency that had spied on them all. Desperate to maintain some semblance of power, East German Party members proceeded to do everything possible to blame their predecessors for the oppression. The party’s name was changed from the Socialist Unity Party to the Party of Democratic Socialism. Mielke was stripped of his party card, as were Honecker, Schabowski, and Krenz.
Krenz was eventually arrested and imprisoned for a few years for his crimes. Schabowski only received one year before receiving a pardon due to his consistent public recantation of his past actions. Mielke became Germany’s oldest prisoner before being released after several years due to senile dementia. He ended his days in a nursing home, having imaginary conversations with Stasi officers on a telephone that wasn’t even plugged in. Honecker spent his remaining few years in a constant battle against both cancer and prosecution before passing away in 1994. As for Margot, the witch got on her broom and escaped to Chile. There, she survived unapologetic and unrepentant until the age of 89 before returning to hell in 2016.
But of all the Warsaw Pact countries, it was Romania that was most determined to stay on its unique path while the nations surrounding it overthrew their Communist governments, one after another. News of the unrest had breached even Ceausescu’s borders, but Nicolae and Elena weren’t going anywhere. Ceausescu held a rally in Bucharest on December 21st, 1989. His goons packed the audience with the most reliable Romanians they could find. The speech would reassure the country that Ceausescu remained in control and was as popular as ever. A few minutes after he began to speak, boos from the crowd began. The moment where Ceausescu realized the crowd was against him, the second he paused and looked confused at the impossible becoming real, was broadcast live throughout Romania, and then the screen went blank.
When the stations resumed broadcasting, they showed the crowds and the chaos. Ceausescu huddled with his henchmen and Elena for an entire day as rioting broke out. The army, used to orders from Ceausescu, waited in their barracks as the unrest spread. Twenty-four hours after his rally, the Ceausescus fled to the roof where a helicopter had just landed for them. There were several countries which they could escape to, and they had hundreds of millions of dollars stashed away in Swiss bank accounts.
Ceausescu ordered the pilot to take them to their palace in the town of Snagov and tried to get in touch with the secret police. Once there, Ceausescu worked the phones, trying to figure out which parts of the country remained in his control. The pilot insisted the helicopter couldn’t hold that many people, took off without the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, and they made their way to the town of Pitesti. He told Ceausescu that the helicopter had been spotted by radar and that they could be shot down at any moment. Ceausescu told the pilot to land in the field close by a road, and the pilot abandoned the Ceausescus there with their bodyguards. One of the bodyguards flagged down a car and the three of them squeezed in.
Now the Ceausescus were on the lam. How do you hide when, for decades, your face had been broadcast every day to everyone in the whole country? Eventually, the Ceausescus were caught. When he was brought into custody, Ceausescu still thought he was commander-in-chief. He didn’t realize he’d been taken into custody as a prisoner. For two days, he and Elena harangued their captor about everything, including the food, the bathroom accommodations, and the clothes that they were given.
Shortly before midnight on the 24th of December, the militia building where they were being held captive came under fire from troops from the secret police. The prisoners were taken to an armored car where they had to hide on the floor for five hours while gunfire was exchanged, and eventually, the secret police were beaten back. It was clear to the soldiers that time was of the essence. It was decided to put the couple on trial then and there.
A classroom in a nearby school was hastily set up to serve as the court. The defense attorney was given 10 minutes to confer with his clients. Ceausescu insisted that “I do not recognize this court,” not entirely unreasonably, and that “I refuse to answer those who have fomented this coup d’état. I’m the president of the republic. I’m your commander-in-chief.” The couple was charged with genocide, organizing armed action against the people, destruction of public assets, sabotage, and attempting to flee the country with funds of more than $1 billion.
At one point, the prosecutor even stopped to ask Elena if she was mentally defective. “Let’s get this over with,” said Ceausescu. The trial took less than an hour, and after a five-minute recess, the judges returned to the courtroom and delivered a verdict of death. As the Ceausescus had their hands tied with rope, Ceausescu insisted that “Romania will live and learn of your treachery.” Under Romanian law, a death sentence could only be carried out 10 days after a verdict had been delivered. For a brief period, the couple still felt somewhat secure.
Now, there’s often a question as to whether dictators like the Ceausescus believe their own bullshit. And in Elena’s case, that definitely seems to have been the case. She yelled at the soldiers, “I brought you up like a mother.” And one of them told her, “Lady, you’re in real trouble.” Her reply has either been translated as, “You keep away from me, you motherfucker,” or “Go fuck your mother,” which was a very unfortunate choice of words given what she had said to them moments prior. It was only when the Ceausescus were taken outside to the school courtyard, and not see a helicopter waiting to return them to Bucharest, that the two of them realized what was going to happen.
“Look,” Elena said, “they’re going to shoot us like dogs.” The couple were placed against the wall, and then the soldiers proved the bitch correct. There were over 100 bullets shot in total by the time they stopped firing the AK-47s at the Ceausescus. As usual, it was bitterly cold in Romania that winter day, with the temperature not even reaching 45 degrees in the capital city of Bucharest. And though no snow fell, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. That day, December 25th, 1989, was still the best Christmas that the Romanian people ever had.
Part of Gorbachev’s reordering of the Soviet Union’s political structure allowed for other alternative voices to emerge. The best example of this was someone named Boris Yeltsin. At the end of 1985, Yeltsin was appointed first secretary of Moscow city committee, which is roughly like being the mayor, despite his reputation for having a fondness for the bottle. Tensions between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, as well as Yeltsin and the Communist Party, eventually spilled out into public. In late 1987, Yeltsin made a speech calling out Gorbachev, the Communist Party, and perestroika itself for good measure. Not only that, he quit the politburo in the guise of giving all the leaders of the Soviet Union an ultimatum. It was the most head-on assault of the power of the General Secretary since the days of Trotsky.
But Yeltsin’s speech was seen less as an act of integrity than of one of ambition. Things reached a low shortly thereafter in the morning of November 9th, 1987, where Yeltsin was found covered in blood. Gorbachev recounted how Yeltsin later claimed that he’d been mugged and fought off his attackers, and of course, he had tossed them around like kittens, but still he had received a knife wound. “By then, I had already discovered Yeltsin’s talent for fiction.” In reality, the wound was clearly self-inflicted, possibly a suicide attempt. Gorbachev explained that the doctor said the wound was not critical at all. The scissors by slipping over his ribs, had left a bloody but superficial wound. And in Yeltsin’s defense, this could have occurred during in one of his drunken stupors.
Years later, it was Bill Clinton’s turn to deal with Yeltsin’s hijinks. As Clinton told an author at the time, he had received notice of a predawn security alarm when secret service agents discovered Yeltsin on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi. Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House where he was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza. I asked Clinton what became of the standoff? Well, the President said, shrugging, “He got his pizza.”
Gorbachev called Yeltsin in the hospital, demanded he discuss his speech with the Moscow city committee. Yeltsin said he couldn’t, that the doctors wouldn’t even let him get up. And Gorbachev said, “That’s OK, the doctors will help you.” They pumped Yeltsin full of sedatives and sent him on to meet his fate. For four hours, Yeltsin was berated by two dozen speakers before admitting his guilt and accepting his dismissal. But while he lost his political position, he nevertheless became a symbol of the Soviet people’s distaste with the system, the same system Gorbachev was trying to reform and salvage.
On September 16th, 1989, Yeltsin was in America visiting the Johnson Space Center in Texas, and then he took an unscheduled visit to a Randalls supermarket in Houston. The supermarket is still there. He was told that the store stocked over 30,000 items, while the typical Soviet store ostensibly carried fewer than 100, but in practice often had bare shelves. It would have seemed like ridiculous pro-American propaganda, but Yeltsin was witnessing it all with his own eyes. Average American citizens could buy things that were out of reach of the wealthiest Soviet citizens. The conquest of bread had been won by the West.
And as Yeltsin flew on to Miami, he clutched his head in his hands because his brain was rewiring itself of decades of being told things that were not true. He understood that those saying such things weren’t just misinformed, not to this extent. They were knowingly, brazenly, lying for decades, or at least completely indifferent to the truth. They had to fool the people, he realized. It’s now clear why they made it so difficult for the average citizen from Soviet Union to go abroad. They were afraid that people’s eyes would open.
As Yeltsin ascended in power, the Soviet government itself began to lose power as the sole decision-making body. The Republic of Lithuania held elections in February 1990, and the vote led to a supreme council issuing a declaration that Lithuania was a sovereign state, free of Soviet rule. Gorbachev declared the act null and void. He implemented an economic blockade against the small Baltic nation, but Lithuania was not East Germany or Hungary. It was still part of the USSR and still under his purview. From his perspective, there was a process for secession, and that secession would have to be through a referendum. Inflation in Lithuania hit 100%. Nevertheless, the authorities in Lithuania persisted.
And in May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of Russia’s parliament. And in doing so, he represented the republic, the Russian republic, that contained half of the USSR’s population, 76% of its land, and 90% of Soviet oil production. The Russians finally did this time send in the tanks. On January 11, 1991, Russian troops fired in a crowd of protesters in Lithuania, killing over a dozen, wounding many more. The Soviets claimed that the protesters shot first, but their story was instantly debunked by foreign reporters who were there. Now, thousands of unarmed Lithuanians took to surrounding their parliament building around the clock to protect their government against further Soviet aggression.
Gorbachev claimed this was all done without his knowledge or his permission, and years later, tried to figure out who gave the order to use force. In either case, he was either complicit or powerless to stop it. Other nations condemned the USSR in no uncertain terms, and within weeks, Iceland officially recognized the Republic of Lithuania. Five days after that, the Lithuanian government did have a referendum, and 90% of the votes were cast in order for Lithuania to remain independent. Now, the idea of secession quickly spread throughout the other Soviet republics.
On March 31st, 1991, Georgia held a referendum on independence. Over 99% of the voters chose to leave the Soviet Union. Then Yeltsin got another promotion in June. He became elected president of Russia with almost 59% of the vote. His closest rival, Gorbachev’s choice, only got 16%. There was now a president of Russia, Yeltsin, and a president of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev. Who was in charge of whom was an increasingly difficult question to answer. Those who had most to lose were men like Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was head of the KGB. The USSR was falling apart and those in power weren’t going down without a fight. Kryuchkov spent weeks getting his allies prepared. When Gorbachev left Moscow for his Crimean dacha on August 4th, 1991, the plotters began to get their plan in order.
On August 18th, he was informed that a group of comrades was there to see him. Not expecting anyone, Gorbachev told his security team that he was livid, that they let people get this close. Gorbachev gave instructions to have them wait. He picked up a phone to make a call, only to find the line was dead. He picked up a second phone, then a third, then a fourth. All the lines were dead. Finally, Gorbachev picked up the cover for the red phone to be used in the event of a nuclear attack on the USSR, a phone so important that no one was even permitted to touch it, even to dust it. But it, too, was dead. Gorbachev understood that a coup was underway.
He went outside to discuss the matter with his wife, Raisa. She was a highly educated woman, and she understood how dangerous a situation the two of them were in. When he returned to his study, he was greeted by five elite Soviet officials. The men were nervous, and he was livid. He began interrogating them what was going on, and they explained to him they came as representatives of an emergency committee and rattled off a list of members, men who had owed their positions to Gorbachev, men that he had considered trustworthy. They said Yeltsin was on the verge of arrest as well. They gave Gorbachev two options, either to declare a state of emergency or to transfer his power to vice president Yanayev, who had joined his name to the coup.
Gorbachev told them, “To hell with you.” “Mikhael Sergeevich,” his chief of staff, said, “you don’t understand what the situation in the country is.” “Shut up, you prick. How dare you give me lectures about the situation in the country.” The men flew back to Moscow, rattled by the meeting. The following day, the Russian media issued the plotters’ declaration that, due to Gorbachev’s state of health, the vice president was now assuming the responsibilities of the president in accordance with the Constitution.
Yeltsin was awakened to news of the coup by his youngest daughter, and like many other Russians, was completely baffled by what this proclamation meant. He tried to call Yanayev, and Yanayev refused to speak with him. And when Yeltsin tried to call Gorbachev, the call couldn’t get through. Now, for all of his escapades, Yeltsin was no fool. A few weeks earlier, he had bonded with a high-ranking general named Pavel Grachev over bottles of vodka. He said, “If our lawfully elected government in Russia were ever threatened, terrorist act, coup d’état, efforts to arrest the leaders, could the military be relied on? Could you be relied on?” “Yes,” Grachev said. At that moment, Yeltsin called Grachev to remind him of that conversation, and though Yeltsin didn’t realize it, Grachev’s fingerprints were all over the coup.
He stammered about needing to obey his superiors before decency got the better of him, and he told Yeltsin that he’d send him a security detachment. As recently as 1989, copy machines in the Soviet Union were locked up by law, but this was 1991, and members of the coup were acting as if they could still somehow control the flow of information. Yeltsin issued a statement denouncing the coup in no uncertain words, and his faxed declaration was then disseminated throughout the world. Putting on a bulletproof vest, he got into his limo and began to ride to his office in Moscow’s White House. On his way to the government building, he passed hundreds of armored vehicles. When he got to the White House, he was greeted by a crowd of journalists who were themselves outnumbered by all the citizens there. He announced that at least 50 tanks are on their way to this building.
When the tanks eventually arrived, Yeltsin went back down to greet them. He approached one tank and posed for pictures while shaking the hands of its commander. He joked, “Apparently, they’re not going to shoot the president of Russia just yet.” In the Soviet Union, dark humor was like food. Not everybody got it. But in this case, they got it. And so did everyone watching the scenes unfolding on television across the world. And back at Gorbachev’s dacha, Raisa, his wife, was a bit more fearful than Yeltsin seemed to be. They had Gorbachev’s transistor radio. When Raisa heard the announcement that Gorbachev was supposedly being deposed due to bad health, she understood this might not be a lie as much as a threat. She hid food so the family would have something to eat and refused to serve anything that hadn’t come prepackaged. As she later put it, “We all knew our history.”
Desperate to get his message out, Gorbachev recorded a speech discussing what had happened and claiming that he remained in good health. He repeated it four times and cut the tape into four sections. He gave one section to his personal secretary, his doctor, and to an aide, and kept the fourth for himself. This was his insurance that the truth would be heard if the worst came to pass. For his part, Yeltsin did not acknowledge the coup’s legal authority and proceeded to govern accordingly. He issued warrants for the arrests the plotters. He declared himself commander-in-chief of Soviet troops on Russian soil and called an emergency session of Russian parliament and suspended the communist party.
As for the plotters, they sat down to plan for storming of the White House. At 3 AM, on August 21st, Operation Thunder was set to begin. Things were going to get very violent, very quickly. Grachev kept true to his word and told the Russian leaders that the building was going to be attacked. He suggested getting a crowd of citizens around the building, thinking the military would be very unlikely to shoot civilians. And soon the streets around the White House were filled with tens of thousands of locals, just as Tiananmen Square had been a little over two years prior.
And that night, Yeltsin took to the airwaves asking for the people’s support. At 11 PM, thousands remained in the streets defying the curfew decreed by the plotters. The alpha group, tasked with storming the White House, had that name with good reason. They had personally led the Soviet assault on the Lithuanian facilities not that long ago. And the leader of them asked his men what they thought. And one of his team told him, “We will not go to the White House to kill people.” And he replied, “And we will not lead you there.” Grachev had a quick discussion with the head of the air force, and he had the same conclusion. Let’s just sit by our phones and try to avert any stupidities.
Thousands of lives were saved because strongmen with guns defied their orders and chose peace over force. For hours, Kryuchkov was befuddled by Grachev’s men weren’t clearing the way for the alpha group to storm the White House. At 2 AM, he got the call. The army wasn’t going to do anything. He’s on his own. Voices were raised, fingers were pointed. By the end, there was little else that the plotters could do. Soviet citizens woke up to hear the news that they were sending a delegation to visit Gorbachev and check on his health. Raisa thought this was it. She began racking her brain, thinking where her husband could hide. In her panic, she suffered a minor stroke, leaving her mute and partially paralyzed for several hours.
When they arrived, a few hours, Gorbachev refused to speak with them, demanding his phones be restored before he would talk. The message came back that this would take a great deal of time. “I’m not in a hurry to go anywhere,” he told them. It took almost two hours, and his first priority was to make calls to officials at home and abroad about what had transpired. At 8 PM, a delegation from the Russian government arrived, and Gorbachev met with them immediately. It was a joyous reunion. After tears and some arguing, they agreed on the next steps.
Late that night, the bulk of the plotters were separated from Kryuchkov and flown to Moscow on their own. Kryuchkov was seated in the back of the Russians’ plane alongside a general who was an aide to the Russian vice president. After Gorbachev, his family, and the Russian officials got off the flight, he moved to follow them. “Wait a little bit,” he was told. When he tried to get up again, he was told again, “Stay seated.” “I think I understand what’s happening,” Kryuchkov said. “You have understood correctly.” Vladimir Kryuchkov, the last functional member of the KGB, was thereupon arrested and alongside his accomplices, charged with high treason. His KGB successor didn’t even last 100 days before dissolving the organization. And he declared, “The traditions of Chekism must be eradicated.”
Gorbachev returned to work the following day. In the past 48 hours, sensing the chaos in the USSR, Latvia and Estonia had both taken the opportunity to affirm their sovereignty as independent nations, just as Lithuania had done. But Gorbachev had a more pressing concern. He was told that documents were being destroyed at an intensive rate at the communist party central committee building as a mob besiged the structure. He immediately signed an order suspending any activity in the building, and the good communists, obedient to authority, stopped what they were doing and peacefully evacuated.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin soon appeared together at the White House and announced a decree suspending the Communist Party. “At the time of its demise,” wrote one historian, “it had 15 million members. Not a single one of them put up any resistance.” Dobbs, the historian’s name is Dobbs. As he put it further, “For seven decades after the 1917 revolution, the Communist Party had deliberately cultivated a sense of mystery as a key to maintaining its own power. Separated from the people, they ruled by a wall of ritual, party leaders acquired an aura of omniscience and aloofness. Scarcely anything was known about their private lives or personal political views. No ordinary mortal was allowed to know how these bureaucratic supermen acquired their fine clothes, what kinds of books and films they enjoyed, or how they made a seemingly miraculous appearance on top of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square on public holidays.”
As the mysteries were gradually explained, the party’s grip over society was automatically undermined. Now the final curtain was ripped away to reveal a group of frightened and rather unremarkable people more intent on saving themselves than the regime they served. A few days later, Belarus declared its independence, and Azerbaijan did so as well. And one week later, on September 6, 1991, the Soviet Union officially acknowledged Lithuania’s independence. Armenia, two weeks after that, declared its independence.
And on December 1st, 1991, Ukraine held a referendum. 92% of Ukrainian voters chose to secede from the Soviet Union. On December 8th, 1991, Yeltsin, working behind the scenes with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine, issued a decree that “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is ceasing its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality.” Both Russia and Ukraine were officially seceding from the USSR.
When Gorbachev took over as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he’d been the youngest leader since Stalin. But by 1991, he was already an old man from another time. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigned his position as president of the Soviet Union. And at 7:35 PM, the hammer and sickle flag of the USSR was permanently lowered from the Kremlin. The following day, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, now a government without a country, officially voted itself out of existence.
In 1981, the overwhelming expert consensus had been one of détente. The premise was that a communist USSR and a democratic USA would rule the world for decades to come. The corrupt and decaying USSR wasn’t going anywhere. Few of the experts ever admitted that they had been wrong, that they’d been wrong the entire time, that they were the ones who were naive and unrealistic. Within 10 years, the Soviet Union went from being a perpetual world-dominating superpower to literal nonexistence and is now becoming a forgotten chapter of world history. More of a kitschy joke than a cautionary tale.
Millions of people were trapped for decades in countries where human life meant nothing. They lived in constant terror from morning until night, and at night, they were waiting for the doorbell to ring in countries where there was no law or any rights of any kind. Did they all live happily ever after when the Soviet Union dissolved? Of course not. Utopias don’t exist, but progress does, and so do victories by good over evil. They happen all the time, both personally and politically.
The foes of liberty are many, and they are powerful, but they are not particularly impressive. They are not all-knowing, they are not all-powerful, they’re often not even particularly bright. They are men and women, far closer to snakes than they are to gods. They can, will, and have been defeated many, many times. So the next time someone tells you that the victory of good over evil, the victory of freedom over tyranny, is ridiculous or utopian or naive, remind them of the story of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Thank you.