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European Realities

The Cold War in Europe ended because years of closer association between East and West had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other, and because of western Europe’s proven record of successfully integrating peripheral countries into a European Community. It ended in 1989 because the peoples in eastern Europe rebelled and Gorbachev did nothing to save the Communist regimes. On the contrary, the Soviet leader insisted that popular sovereignty was unavoidable both in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself. The eastern European regimes had shown that they could not reform. Therefore, the head of the CPSU found, it was not unnatural for them to fall. It was a remarkable turn of events, but one that had its portents in the beginning transformations of the détente era. The end of Communism could happen so quickly in Europe because the ground had already been laid and because the support of the regimes in the East was already wafer-thin. Unless the Soviets would act to rescue them, they could not defend themselves successfully.

By 1989, Gorbachev insisted that to him the Cold War was over. His attention was increasingly being drawn to how to deepen reform within the Soviet Union itself. His main preoccupation was with political changes. Gorbachev wanted to make the USSR a democratic, federal state and to pull the Communist Party, which he still headed, along in the process. But his lofty aims were quickly overtaken by economic hardships, nationalisms, and competing bureaucracies. With Gorbachev refusing to budge, and without substantial aid coming in from elsewhere, the Soviet state was soon in serious trouble. By 1991 its very existence seemed threatened. This was a remarkable turnaround for the Soviet people and for the world, and it all happened within less than a decade.

Overall, the people’s revolutions in eastern Europe were astonishingly peaceful and nonviolent. The one big exception was Yugoslavia, where nationalist demagogues in their hurry to kill off the federal state set off waves of violence that were to last a decade, inflicting terrible suffering on most Yugoslavs. Yugoslavia was the prime example of a country that the Cold War had helped hold together. Confronted with Soviet power in eastern Europe, as they had been since 1948, most Yugoslavs had preferred sticking together in their own, homegrown, federal state, even if they did not always like their neighbors. But as the Cold War receded, some members of each Yugoslav nationality began to worry about the consequences if one or more of the other groups within that federal state got the upper hand on themselves. Yugoslavia had been held together not by trust but by fear, and with the object of that fear shifting, the country descended into destruction and fratricide.

OTHERS HAD MUCH to be grateful for. In America, the year 1989 began on a cheerful note. Ronald Reagan was stepping down as president after eight years in office, and was widely celebrated for his achievements. The election of his vice president, George H. W. Bush, as his successor confirmed that most Americans had forgiven Reagan for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal as well as the increasingly hands-off leadership style in his last years in office. What they remembered, they thought, was a president who had fixed the economy and removed the threat of nuclear destruction. No other president since Woodrow Wilson had changed his foreign policy views more during his time in office. In his farewell address, Reagan spoke about the Soviets as partners. “My view,” the departing president told the American people,

is that President Gorbachev is different from previous Soviet leaders. I think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix them. We wish him well. And we’ll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one. What it all boils down to is this: I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner.¹

President Bush was less certain. At the beginning of his presidency, he wanted time to consider how US policy toward the Soviets should develop under the new circumstances. A much more traditional Cold Warrior than Reagan, Bush was not sure that the “new closeness” would continue. On the contrary, as he noted at the beginning of his presidency, the Soviet Union “presents a new and complicated political challenge to us in Europe and elsewhere. My own sense is that the Soviet challenge may be even greater than before because it is more varied.”² “The Cold War is not over,” warned Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. There may be “light at the end of the tunnel. But I think it depends partly on how we behave, whether the light is the sun or an incoming locomotive.”³ Bush and Scowcroft feared that perestroika and glasnost might be too successful, so that the Western alliances lowered their guard too much.

Gorbachev was disappointed at Bush’s “strategic pause.” Why, he asked himself, were the Americans hesitating now when he needed them most? In western Europe Gorbachev was still regarded as a hero, and got a hero’s welcome everywhere. Even British prime minister Margaret Thatcher went out of her way to heap praise on Gorbachev during their meetings in London in April 1989. When Gorbachev complained about Bush, Thatcher responded that “your success is in our interest. It is in our interest that the Soviet Union become more peaceful, more affluent, more open to change so that this would go together with personal freedoms, with more openness, and exchanges. Continue your course, and we will support your line. The prize will be enormous.”⁴ Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, confided to his diary that “Russia has no other option left. It has to become like everybody else. If this happens, then the October and Stalin syndromes will disappear from world politics. The world will truly be completely different.”⁵

But Gorbachev needed foreign support to turn around his flagging fortunes at home. The CPSU still held a predominant position in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Gorbachev wanted to move ahead with creating a more democratic Soviet Union as soon as possible, including in the republics. He also wanted to reform the economy, making some room for private enterprise. But while loans and investments from abroad were very slow in arriving, the domestic economy eroded further. High inflation and an increasing dependence on the black market hindered the development of consumerism at home. Government deficits increased, especially at the federal level, since taxes were withheld or embezzled. And meanwhile resistance against Gorbachev’s leadership grew, both from leaders in the republics, who wanted more power for themselves, and from within the Communist Party at the central level, where traditionalists accused him of throwing away the achievements of Soviet rule.

Nationalist unrest in a few of the Soviet republics also began to undermine Gorbachev’s position. In the Baltic states, forced to join the USSR after World War II, most of the protest was peaceful, but determined. Already in 1988 the Communist-controlled Supreme Soviet of Estonia had declared that the laws of their republic took precedence over Soviet laws. During the elections to the new federal assembly, more than 80 percent of the seats in neighboring Lithuania went to non-Communist candidates. In a further sign that even inside the Soviet Union nationalism trumped ideology, the two Communist-led republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan began confronting each other over control of the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan. Tens of thousands of people fled from their homes and hundreds were killed, including some by the Red Army, whom Gorbachev sent in to enforce the peace. The crackdown bought some time for Moscow, but at the cost of both sides accusing Gorbachev of siding with their enemies.⁶

While Gorbachev attempted to march on with his reforms in the Soviet Union, his Communist colleagues in eastern Europe had less and less room for maneuver. Their economies were in trouble, with high debt payments and stagnant production. By 1987 there was nearly no growth at all, across the East Bloc, from Poland to Bulgaria. Although living standards varied greatly, with East Germans, Czechoslovaks, and Hungarians still doing better than, say, the poorer countries in the European Community, the overall trend was downward. Further loans from the West were hard to obtain, and the Soviets had made it clear that they would look after their own urgent needs first. In the late 1980s the economic situation started to spill over into politics. Some Communist leaders, often of the younger generation, started to feel that they needed to mobilize the whole people if an economic collapse were to be avoided. And the only way such a mobilization could happen was through political inclusiveness.

As always, it was Poland that went first. The leaders of the Polish Communist Party found themselves in a desperate economic situation, in which they were unable to repay their foreign loans while paying ever more in wages and social services to prevent workers from rebelling against them. In November 1987, encouraged by Moscow, they set up a referendum in which they asked the population to vote yes to two questions: Are you in favor of radical economic reform? Are you for a deep democratization of political life? But Poles distrusted their government so much that they would not even answer such questions in the affirmative. In desperation, Poland’s president, General Jaruzelski, appointed a new government that would introduce market-based reforms in the economy. But Polish workers welcomed the government with a wave of strikes in 1988. It was clear that even the policy of buying off the working class was failing.

Jaruzelski’s final gamble was to arrange negotiations with the opposition so that at least some groups could be persuaded to help take responsibility for the economic crisis. He believed that although the workers were still rebellious, the old leadership of Solidarity—most of whom had been in prison since 1981—would no longer be the key leaders. The government even allowed a televised debate in November 1988 between the head of their official trade union and Lech Wałęsa, the former head of Solidarity. The result was another disaster. Wałęsa trounced his opponent.

OFFICIAL: Is trade union pluralism the only solution to all Polish problems? It is also necessary to see opportunities in the party, where significant transformations are happening and will be happening.…

WAŁĘSA: When I speak of pluralism, I have in mind three spheres: the economy, trade unions, and politics. We have to understand that, because those ideals will triumph sooner or later. One organization will never have a copyright on all knowledge. That is why we fight for pluralism—whether you like it or not.…

OFFICIAL: But you understand that, given the very impulsive nature of Poles, diversity must be found in unity. Otherwise, we will tear each other apart.

WAŁĘSA: We will not make people happy by force. Give them freedom, and we will stop stumbling in place.…

OFFICIAL: Do you not see here essential structural changes moving in the direction of democracy?

WAŁĘSA: What I see is that we are going by foot, while others go by car.⁷

Forced by public opinion, encouraged by the Soviets, and entreated by their own senior leaders, the Polish Communist Party’s Central Committee agreed to formal negotiations with the opposition to begin in February 1989. With Solidarity still banned, the movement appointed prominent Polish intellectuals and Catholic clergy to represent them. Walesa co-chaired the roundtable meetings with General Czesław Kiszczak, the Communist minister of interior who had put him in prison in 1981. The negotiations moved slowly at first. The Communists attempted to keep constitutional reform from being discussed. Solidarity was split between the Wałęsa mainstream and more radical factions that denounced any compromise with the authorities. But slowly a compromise was reached, in which Solidarity would be legalized and free elections held, to begin with, for 35 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament (the Sejm) and for all of the seats in the new Senate. It was a risky enterprise, both for the Communists and for Solidarity. Jaruzelski hoped to legitimize the Communists’ hold on power. Wałęsa wanted to show Solidarity’s strength in elections, set for 4 June 1989.

While Communists and their opponents battled for power in Poland, the Hungarian Communist Party was slowly feeling its way toward a compromise with its own population. Hungary had long been the most liberal of the East Bloc countries. But even there the limit had been set at questioning the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. However, by 1988 younger leaders in the Hungarian party, inspired by Gorbachev, wanted to go further in terms of liberalization. They thought that by transforming the party, they stood a good chance of hanging on to power, even if the opposition was allowed to organize. In May 1988 the aging leader János Kádár, who had been in charge since the Soviet invasion more than thirty years earlier, was replaced by the reformer Károly Grósz. The new head of the party praised Gorbachev’s reforms. By February 1989 Hungary had introduced freedom of speech and legalized some non-Communist groups. In May travel restrictions to Austria were lifted, meaning that Hungarians were the first people in the Warsaw Pact who could move freely across the borders to a non-Communist country.

In June 1989 the Hungarian Communist authorities took a step that dramatically indicated their break with the past. In Budapest, under great official fanfare, the leader of the 1956 revolution, Imre Nagy, was reburied. Nagy, who had been executed after the Soviet invasion, stood for many as the symbol of Hungarian nationalism and resistance against Moscow’s domination. Gorbachev had only gradually come around to reevaluating the events of 1956, but he let the Hungarians know that the Soviets had no objections. Already in February 1989 he had made it clear that the USSR was seeking “a restructuring of its relations with the socialist countries” that emphasized “unconditional independence, full equality, strict non-interference in internal affairs, and rectification of deformities and mistakes linked with earlier periods in the history of socialism.”⁸ Young Hungarians were out to test these intentions. Viktor Orbán, a twenty-five-year-old who spoke on behalf of the youth at Nagy’s funeral, accused the Communists of having robbed young people of their future through their “blind obedience to the Russian empire and [to] the dictatorship of a single party.”⁹

As late as the summer of 1989 Gorbachev remained convinced that his aim of a qualitatively new alliance among socialist states could be made a reality. He wanted a reconstituted socialist community, in which not only eastern Europe (including Yugoslavia) but also China could find a place. Although Sino-Soviet relations had improved during Gorbachev’s time in power, he was, as usual, impatient, and wanted more of a breakthrough than his assistants had been able to give him with the skeptical Chinese. In 1989 he decided to go to China himself in order to normalize relations and get off to a new start through meeting with Deng Xiaoping. “One has to understand the Chinese,” Gorbachev told the Politburo. “They have a right to become a great power.” The Chinese were “getting stronger,” the Soviet leader said. “Everyone can see it.”¹⁰

Gorbachev was undoubtedly right that China was getting stronger as a result of Deng’s economic reforms. But many of the most basic problems in Chinese society remained similar to those the Soviets were trying to deal with at home. After all, the People’s Republic of China had been set up as almost a direct copy of the USSR. By the late 1980s many young Chinese were impatient for political and social reforms of the kind Gorbachev was attempting to carry out in the Soviet Union. They demanded freedom of speech and association, and deplored the corruption and inequality that had come with the new direction in the economy. Deng would have nothing of it. To him, reform meant strengthening, not weakening, the Communist Party’s grip on power. In 1986 he had unceremoniously fired the party’s general secretary, the popular Hu Yaobang, for having moved too far in allowing an open debate of China’s problems. Students who protested were thrown in prison and workers who attempted to organize independently of the party were harassed.

When Hu Yaobang died suddenly in April 1989, student activists made his passing an occasion for lamenting the lack of democracy in China. But the small memorial gatherings they organized quickly turned into a broader protest against one-party dictatorship. By May large rallies staged by students, workers, and young professionals were taking place in the major cities, and protesters occupied the central square in Beijing, at Tian’anmen. Their slogans would not have been out of place in eastern Europe: Long live democracy! Patriotism is not criminal! Oppose corruption! We are the people! The Communist Party leadership hesitated on what to do. Deng wanted an immediate crackdown, but the new secretary general, Deng’s protégé Zhao Ziyang, hoped to find a way of compromising with the protesters. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Beijing on the first visit of a Soviet leader for more than thirty years.

Instead of being a stunning international triumph, the May 1989 visit turned into a quandary for the guests. With Tian’anmen off limits, the Soviet delegation had to be smuggled into the Great Hall of the People through a back entrance. From there, Gorbachev could hear the protesting students chanting his name. He sympathized with the protesters, but could not run the risk of criticizing his hosts. Instead he took refuge in platitudes, talking about the friendship between the Soviet and Chinese peoples. In private he wondered how long the Chinese Communists would remain in power. “Some of those present here,” he told his colleagues in a meeting at the Soviet embassy on 15 May, “have promoted the idea of taking the Chinese road. We saw today where this road leads. I do not want Red Square to look like Tian’anmen Square.”¹¹ Luckily for Gorbachev, his host was intent on compromise. The questions of the past, Deng said, somewhat lamely, were not “ideological disagreements. We were also wrong.… The Soviet Union incorrectly perceived China’s place in the world.… The essence of all problems was that we were unequal, that we were subjected to coercion and pressure.”¹²

With Gorbachev hurrying back to Moscow, Deng Xiaoping had cleared the deck for his assault. For his hesitation, the party leader Zhao Ziyang was dispatched in the same way as his predecessor: he was to spend the next fifteen years under house arrest. Drawing on his military connections, Deng made all the decisions. On 4 June tanks moved in to clear Tian’anmen Square. Hundreds of prodemocracy protesters were killed as troops occupied central Beijing. Thousands were imprisoned or went into exile. The new party leadership was handpicked by Deng and his associates. China’s international status dropped considerably, but the country was too important to isolate entirely, especially for the Bush Administration, which still believed that it needed China to balance the USSR. Most importantly for the Americans, Deng may have crushed the democratic aspirations of his countrymen, but he was not about to give up on economic market reform. A couple of years later, at the age of eighty-eight, he went on a tour of the southern provinces and extolled their reformist zeal. “Are such things as securities and stocks good, do they cause danger, are they things unique to capitalism, can socialism make use of them?” he mused. “It is permissible to judge, but we must be resolute in having a try.”¹³

In eastern Europe, however, economic reform was no longer enough to preserve Communist rule. Poland’s first multiparty elections since the start of the Cold War were held on the same day as the crackdown in Beijing. The result was a disaster for the Communists, far beyond anything they or Moscow had imagined. Of all the 161 contested seats in the Sejm, Solidarity took 160. In the Senate, where all the seats were contested, they won 99 out of 100. The final seat went to an independent candidate. The Polish Communist Party, in power since 1945, was not just defeated but humiliated. It tried to put together a new government from its nominal majority in the Sejm, but allies and even party members began to desert the sinking ship. On 24 August 1989 the Communists capitulated, and the Sejm voted in a non-Communist government, headed by the Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Everyone held their breath to see what the Soviet reaction would be to the Communists’ loss of power.

But Gorbachev’s position was already clear. In a speech to the Council of Europe after the Polish elections the Soviet leader reminded his astonished listeners that “the social and political orders of certain countries [in Europe] changed in the past, and may change again in the future. However, this is exclusively a matter for the peoples themselves to decide; it is their choice. Any interference in internal affairs, or any attempts to limit the sovereignty of states—including friends and allies, or anyone else—is impermissible.”¹⁴ His press spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, was even clearer: “We will maintain ties with any Polish government that emerges after the recent elections. This is purely a Polish internal affair. Any solution adopted by our Polish friends will be acceptable to us.”¹⁵ Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Cherniaev, noted in his diary that he thought “a complete dismantling of socialism as a factor of world development is in process. Maybe this is inevitable and good. For this is a matter of humanity uniting on the basis of common sense. And this process was started by a regular guy from Stavropol.”¹⁶

Both in western Europe and in the United States the reaction to events in Poland was one of disbelief. Nobody had expected that the Polish Communists would capitulate so fully or that Gorbachev would be the midwife for a non-Communist Poland. The Bush Administration’s approach was, as usual, cautious. The president worried more about possible unrest that could lead to a backlash from the Red Army in Poland or against Gorbachev in the USSR than he did about assistance to the new Polish government, which western Europeans were pressing hard for. During his visit to Poland and Hungary in July 1989 Bush kept stressing the need for moderate and realistic aims, and underlined that what the United States could do to help was limited, not least financially. To some Europeans, east and west, it was all too much caution. “Bush, as a President, has a very big drawback,” Mitterrand confided to Gorbachev, “he lacks original thinking altogether.”¹⁷

But on some issues the western Europeans were cautious themselves. This was especially true for any issue that touched on the status of Germany. The settlement of borders in Europe as a result of World War II, including the borders that divided Germany, had kept the peace, some leaders believed. It had also been helpful to the sense of western Europe as a community of equals that West Germany had a not dissimilar population size to France, Britain, and Italy, even if it had a larger economy. As unrest began increasing in East Germany in early September 1989, both western and eastern European leaders, including Thatcher and Mitterrand, underlined to Gorbachev that German unification was not on the cards. Gorbachev agreed, but his main problem was the stability of East Germany. Its leader, Erich Honecker, had stubbornly refused to go along with any of the Soviet leader’s tempered suggestions that reforms were needed. By the late summer of 1989 Gorbachev was losing patience with Honecker and his constant sniping at Gorbachev’s own policies. The GDR had even started banning Soviet publications from entering the country. Gorbachev wanted Honecker replaced, but he could not express this wish openly for fear of destabilizing the entire East German state.

As it turned out, the citizens of East Germany were even more impatient with their leader. Throughout the summer of 1989 groups of East Germans had traveled to other eastern European countries in order to get to West Germany from there. On 19 August the Hungarian authorities, acting in part from humanitarian motives and in part in order to get West German loans, allowed 900 of these refugees to cross the border to Austria. Honecker was furious and accused the Hungarians of being traitors to socialism. But there was little he could do about it. Inside East Germany open defiance of the regime had begun to spread. In Leipzig, where the churches had organized groups around human rights and disarmament, demonstrations began in early September. First the slogan was “We Want to Leave.” But then, almost unperceptively, it shifted to “Down with Stasi,” “We Are Going Nowhere,” and, unyieldingly and climactically, “We Are the People.” Thousands were arrested and some were beaten up. But the protests continued.

The East German regime had nowhere to turn. Gorbachev despised most of the leaders there. The West, including West Germany, would not come to their rescue, even though Chancellor Helmut Kohl feared that Honecker could use massive force to stay in power. For a while a “Chinese solution” was indeed contemplated in East Berlin, but it was stranded on Gorbachev’s known position and on increasing worries among younger Communist leaders that they could personally be held responsible for any bloodshed. Honecker still believed he could ride out the storm. But the upcoming fortieth anniversary of the GDR, which he had planned to celebrate with all pomp possible, put him in a difficult spot. It gave the opposition an aim for their mobilization. And, worse, it would bring Gorbachev to Berlin as the guest of honor, in the middle of Honecker’s attempts at crushing the dissent.

As usual, Gorbachev avoided criticizing his hosts openly. The furthest he would go was in telling a TV reporter on 6 October that the “only danger is not to react to life itself.” But it was clear to all who attended the closed-session meetings that Honecker did not have the Soviet leader’s trust. After Gorbachev’s visit the GDR police and military gave up trying to stop the demonstrators. At least 70,000 marched in Leipzig 9 October. A week later the number was 120,000. And a week after that more than 300,000. By then Honecker was gone, voted out by the Central Committee of his own party. The new party chief, Egon Krenz, promised negotiations with the opposition. He also made it clear that the East German authorities were preparing new and more liberal travel arrangements for its citizens to visit West Germany, including West Berlin. At a 9 November press conference, Günter Schabowski, the GDR government’s chief spokesman, said it had already been decided that people with proper permission would be allowed to cross the border. Asked repeatedly when the new regulations would come into force, Schabowski finally said that he thought it would be “immediately, forthwith.”

That evening thousands of jubilant East Berliners moved toward the checkpoints in the Wall, disregarding the need to apply for permission. At first, GDR border guards, having no instructions on how to handle the situation, tried to fend them off, threatening to shoot if the crowds surged forward. They then began letting the loudest protestors pass through individually and very slowly, in the hopes that doing so would reduce tension. But the crowds just grew and were pushing up against the Forbidden Zone around the checkpoints. Around 11:00 p.m., fearing for their own safety, the East German officers gave up and lifted the barriers.¹⁸ Large groups of people began crossing from east to west without any documents whatsoever. That evening they embraced their surprised western countrymen along the main avenues in West Berlin. “What I will never forget is this,” one East Berliner remembers. “The taste of my first strawberry yoghurt! It tasted so good that I lived on it for a week!”¹⁹ Already the next morning some enterprising Berliners began hacking away at the Wall itself. East German guards tried to chase them away for another few days. But by the end of the following week the guards themselves were seen dismantling parts of the Wall. One of the most shameful symbols of the Cold War was nearing its end.

The accidental opening of the Berlin Wall was, literally, the main breakthrough in the miraculous year 1989. With the Wall down, relations between East and West Germany were certain to be transformed. How far and how fast nobody could tell, but there was no way things could stay the way they had been before. People and policy-makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain began to imagine very different kinds of futures. Almost everyone celebrated the opportunities, but there were also concerns. For all its drawbacks and human costs, the Cold War international system had kept the peace in Europe for almost fifty years. People born in 1900 had seen two cataclysmic wars, in which more than sixty million Europeans died. People born fifty years later had seen none.

The end of the Cold War in Europe first and foremost meant an opportunity to end the German problem. The Cold War had kept Germany divided, against the wishes of most of its population. The opening of the Berlin Wall foretold some ending of that abnormal situation. But European leaders were wary of Germany’s size and its economic power, especially if unified. For the leaders in the European Community, except Thatcher, who was profoundly skeptical of Germany reuniting at all, the solution had to be further European integration. Within a deeper form of community, which would make nation-states parts of a European political, economic, and monetary union, Germany’s strengths would be Europe’s strength. Helmut Kohl agreed. In a speech to the Bundestag in November 1989, where he launched a ten-point plan for German unity, Kohl stressed Germany’s essential European-ness: “The future architecture of Germany must fit into the future architecture of Europe.… Linking the German question to the development of Europe as a whole… makes possible an organic development that takes into account the interests of everyone involved”²⁰

The Single European Act, which had come into force in the European Community in 1987, was the most ambitious expansion of the integration process for thirty years. The agreement committed the members to move toward a full European Union, with all tariffs and border controls removed, and with free movement of goods, people, services, and capital. The Union would also aim for a common monetary policy and help coordinate common foreign and defense policies. It was a big step, which helped reduce concern with an overmighty Germany sitting astride Europe and pointed toward the Maastricht agreement of 1992. “Economic and monetary union will be a linchpin in favor of political integration,” insisted France’s president, François Mitterrand. “It will mean that a decisive step will have been taken toward achieving a real union—that is, a European political union.”²¹

The French president was probably among the first European leaders who realized that some form of German unification would be impossible to avoid. But he wanted to get the maximum in return, for himself and for France, in order to agree to such a rearrangement. He therefore played on Thatcher’s doubt about German reunification in order, later, to act as mediator on behalf of the Germans. This scheme, Mitterrand thought, would connect a unified Germany even more closely to France and help deliver French aims, such as monetary union and stronger political integration. “The sudden prospect of reunification had delivered a sort of mental shock to the Germans. Its effect had been to turn them once again into the ‘bad’ Germans they used to be,” the French president told Thatcher in January 1990. “He had said to [Kohl] that no doubt Germany could if it wished achieve reunification, bring Austria into the European Community and even regain other territories which it had lost as a result of the war. They might make even more ground than had Hitler. But they would have to bear in mind the implications.”²²

The devious Mitterrand had of course said no such thing. In public, as in private to the West German leaders, he had from the very beginning stressed Germany’s right to self-determination.²³ What really limited the significance of the French president’s scheming, however, was George Bush’s surprisingly clear and immediate support of Kohl’s policies. Already in November 1989 Bush had told the German leader that he was “very supportive of your general approach.… We are on the same wavelength. I appreciated your ten points and your exposition on the future of Germany.”²⁴More importantly, Bush told both the US public and members of his own Administration not to fear German unification. And already by February 1990 he instructed his secretary of state, James Baker, that the US aim was “a unified Germany in the Western alliance.”²⁵ The US president’s position left Thatcher fuming on the sidelines and Kohl free to develop his policy for unification. The big question was how Mikhail Gorbachev would react to the German plans.

While East Germany was collapsing, the onslaught against the other eastern European Communist regimes continued. The Hungarian regime, which had been one of the forerunners for reform, avoided further protest by simply dissolving the Communist Party and the People’s Republic already in October 1989. The party was reborn as the Socialist Party, within a reconstituted Republic of Hungary. The new government set May 1990 as the month for Hungary’s first free elections for over forty years. The reaction in the Kremlin, so different from 1956, was simply to congratulate the Hungarian party with its courage and foresight. Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze declared that “each country has the right to absolute freedom of choice.”²⁶

In Czechoslovakia, where the regime had resisted reform for as long as it could, the end was different but synchronous. Being burdened with the responsibility for the crackdown after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the Communist Party was even more unpopular in Czechoslovakia than elsewhere in eastern Europe. The man who had been in charge of the persecution, Gustáv Husák, had been forced to resign as party leader in 1987, in part because he was personally anathema to Gorbachev. But the leaders who replaced him were entirely hapless, especially Miloš Jakeš, the new general secretary, whose bumbling speeches were the cause of much mirth across the country. A week after the Berlin Wall had come down, demonstrations against the government broke out in Prague. They soon spread to others parts of the country. Prominent intellectuals, among them the playwright Václav Havel, who had several times been imprisoned for dissent, formed a Civic Forum, which demanded talks with the regime. Journalists took over some of the newspapers and began spreading the message of the opposition, including calling for a general strike. Jakeš and some members of the party leadership wanted to use the police and military against the demonstrators, but found that they could not be trusted. On 24 November Jakeš and the entire party presidium resigned, and the new leaders began negotiating with the opposition.

The next day it became clear that the balance of power in Czechoslovakia had changed forever. In Prague alone, eight hundred thousand people marched against the Communist Party, chanting slogans such as “We Want Democracy,” “Back to Europe,” and “Havel for President.” Alexander Dubček, the party leader who had been forced out by the Soviets after 1968, joined with the demonstrators. In speeches both in his native Slovakia and in Prague, Dubček called for change and nonviolence. “If there once was light, why should there be darkness again?” Dubček told the crowds. “Let us act… to bring back the light.”²⁷ On 29 November the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly, still dominated by Communists, voted to introduce multiparty democracy. A month later the same assembly voted in the former dissident Václav Havel as new president of the country. A whole generation of Communist officials slunk away into the shadows. In his first speech as president, Havel gave his harsh verdict on what Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution” had inherited: “Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.… We have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe.” The only solution, Havel said, was to create “a republic of well-rounded people, because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems—human, economic, ecological, social, or political.”²⁸

In Bulgaria the end of Communism came in a different way, and more slowly. The poorest of the East Bloc countries, Bulgaria had benefitted more than any of the others from exchanges among them. Even in the 1980s, many Bulgarians saw Communism as a relatively successful development program, even though they resented the authoritarianism and oppression of the government. Most Bulgarians also felt a distinct kinship with the Russians for cultural and historical reasons. With Gorbachev in power in Moscow, this sense of closeness could lead to unexpected results, though. On 10 November, one day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, younger Communist leaders ousted party head Todor Zhivkov for his failure to instigate Gorbachev-style reforms. Zhivkov had lead the party for more than thirty-five years. He was a father figure for many Bulgarians and not widely hated like a Husak or a Jaruzelski. The new leaders wanted to build on the successes of Bulgarian socialism, while moving closer to the European Community, and position themselves to remain in power after a multiparty system had been introduced.

The Bulgarian Communists succeeded to a remarkable degree with their plans, though they did so by nefarious means. By initiating roundtable negotiations along the Polish model, they bought time so that the party could reconstitute itself as a Socialist Party in time for the first free elections in June 1990. Uniquely in the former Soviet bloc, the former Bulgarian Communists not only won the first free election but helped oversee the transition to a new market-based economic system. But a main reason for their success was an unprecedented Communist campaign to force Muslim Bulgarians to give up their identity and take Christian names. Starting in 1984, Zhivkov’s regime had prohibited the use of Turkish in public and closed many mosques. In 1989, as it came under pressure, the Communist Party began forcibly deporting Muslim activists to Turkey. Several people were killed in clashes with the police. In the panic that followed at least three hundred thousand Bulgarian Muslims were expelled or fled across the border. It linked the Communist Party with Bulgarian nationalism and foreshadowed the terrible crimes that would happen further west in the Balkans a few years later.

Even worse violence took place in Romania, as the Communist Party there tried to cling on to power. The Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu prided himself on his country’s independence from Moscow. Although nominally a member of the Warsaw Pact, Romania had condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and later criticized Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa and in the Middle East. Romanian insubordination was of course welcomed in the West, and Ceauşescu was rewarded with access to Western technology and invitations to foreign capitals. In 1978 the increasingly erratic dictator was even granted a visit with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace—having been tipped off in advance, the palace staff reportedly removed all valuables from the guest rooms so that Ceauşescu and his wife Elena would not bring them back to their poverty-stricken country. For while Ceauşescu was being feted abroad, Romania was falling deeper and deeper into destitution, not least because their leader insisted on spending enormous amounts on gigantic vanity projects, such as the construction of the world’s largest parliament building in the capital, Bucharest.

Ceauşescu believed he was safe from the sort of upheavals that happened elsewhere in eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, since his regime was not dependent on Soviet support. But Romanians were running out of patience. Living standards had declined for more than a decade and shortages were acute. Besides Albania, Romania’s GDP was the lowest in Europe, roughly on a par with Jordan or Jamaica. And Ceauşescu’s insistence on being treated like a godlike figure even by other Communist Party leaders made some of them long to get rid of him. The end therefore came quickly when it came. After a week’s unrest in the city of Timişoara, Ceauşescu addressed the people of Bucharest in front of his new Parliament building. At first things looked normal. Hundreds of people were holding up posters with Ceauşescu’s portrait, as they always had done at such events. The party leader saluted the revolutionary courage of the capital’s population. Then:

CEAUŞESCU: I also want to thank the initiators and organizers of this great event from Bucharest, considering it as a…, as a.…

CROWD: Ti-mi-şoa-ra! Ti-mi-şoa-ra!

BODYGUARD: Move back into the office, sir.

CEAUŞESCU: What? No, wait.

BODYGUARD: Why are they screaming?

CROWD: We want bread!

ELENA Ceauşescu, to crowd: Silence!

CEAUŞESCU: Hallo!

CROWD: Down with Ceauşescu!

ELENA: Silence!

CEAUŞESCU, to Elena: Hush! Shut up!

CEAUŞESCU: Comrades! Sit down quietly!²⁹

All of this was in front of live microphones and therefore broadcast to the whole country.

Fighting broke out around the square and engulfed the city overnight. Nobody could quite say who was fighting whom because some military units joined the protesters. Hundreds of people were killed. There were rumors of snipers from Ceauşescu’s dreaded secret police, the Securitate, firing on people from rooftops. The next morning the crowds stormed the Central Committee building, where the Ceauşescus had been hiding out. But they had already fled by helicopter. On landing in a small town 75 kilometers northwest of Bucharest, the president and his wife were taken prisoner by the local military. On Christmas Day 1989 they were both shot after a summary trial. The film of their trial is a sad sight: an elderly, bewildered couple who do not quite understand what is happening to them. As the verdict is read, they ask to be executed together. Communist Romania ended, as it had begun, in blood.

While eastern Europe liberated itself, the Soviet and the US leaders finally met for a proper summit, on ships anchored at Malta in the Mediterranean in December 1989. At their first meeting, onboard the Soviet ship Maksim Gorkii, Bush and Gorbachev agreed that the Cold War was over. But they drew different conclusions as to what that meant. For Bush, it seemed as if removing the USSR as a consistent adversary simply freed the United States to get more of what it wanted elsewhere. To Gorbachev’s amazement, in view of the historic changes in Europe, one of Bush’s main points was to end Soviet support for Nicaragua (and hopefully also for Cuba). It seemed as if to the US president the Cold War had simply returned to where it had been before World War II—a global ideological struggle, rather than a conflict between two Superpowers. For the Soviet president, the stakes were much higher. This was principally because he faced a battle for reform inside the USSR. But it was also because he believed that the world was turning away from what had produced the Cold War. “We see today that reliance on force, on military superiority, was wrong,” Gorbachev told Bush.

It did not justify itself.… The emphasis on confrontation based on our different ideologies is wrong. We had reached a dangerous point, and it is good that we stopped to reach an understanding. Reliance on nonequal exchange between the developed countries and the developing world cannot go on. It has collapsed. Look at how many problems there are in the developing world that affect all of us. Overall, my conclusion is that strategically and philosophically, the methods of the Cold War were defeated… [though] we face problems of survival, including the environment and problems of resources.³⁰

At Malta, the two sides agreed to intensify arms control negotiations, consult on German questions, and open up for increased trade and technological exchanges. The summit went off well. But it was also clear that the two men had less to talk about than at earlier Soviet-American summits. The Cold War international system was fading fast. Gorbachev was facing the battle of his life in reforming and uniting the Soviet Union, while transitioning it to a democratic form of government. There is no doubt that Bush genuinely wished him well in that enterprise. Bush believed that the United States had won the inter-state Cold War, and his inherent caution made him disinclined to believe that high levels of conflict inside the USSR at this stage would necessarily be to the US advantage. Some of his advisers thought that only the breakup of the Soviet Union would mean a final end to the Cold War. But the president was not on their side. Bush, as always, preferred stability over any kind of risk-taking.

When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, problems were piling up. In the Caucasus, the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan was blockading the Soviet republic of Armenia, creating massive economic dislocation. In the Baltic states, the demand for independence was getting increasingly vocal. In August 1989 people across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined hands, quite literally, and formed the longest human chain ever. They sang songs of freedom and independence, and of telling the truth about history. “Three sisters woke up from their sleep, now come to stand for themselves,” went one of them.³¹ In Moscow, the CPSU Central Committee condemned what they called mindless nationalism. But even the Communists in the Baltic states understood which way the wind was blowing. In December 1989, just after Gorbachev returned from the Malta summit, the Lithuanian Communist Party broke with the CPSU and asserted its full independence. Like in eastern Europe, the Baltic Communists had begun to believe that the only way they could remain relevant was by joining the national revolution.

Given the high level of nationalist agitation that took place in some of the European and Caucasian republics, many CPSU leaders advised Gorbachev to postpone the free elections that he had promised they would hold in 1990. But Gorbachev held firm. He feared that taking a step back now would lead to him losing control over the CPSU at the central union level. To his advisers, Gorbachev explained that only if he could play the democrats against the party apparatus did he stand a chance of success. It was clear that he did not fully trust his own party any longer. In the Baltic republics the elections went as could be expected. In all of them non-Communist parties won. These parties then proceeded to do what they had promised their electorate: to assert national independence. Lithuania went first and furthest. In March 1990 its elected Supreme Soviet reconstituted itself as the Supreme Council, which promptly declared that “the sovereign powers of the State of Lithuania, abolished by foreign forces in 1940, is re-established, and henceforth Lithuania is again an independent state.”³² Nobody in the council voted against the declaration of independence. Two weeks later the Estonian assembly proclaimed the Soviet occupation of their country illegal, and the Latvians followed suit in May 1990. Gorbachev had a very big challenge on his hands.

Gorbachev’s aim in 1990 was to force the CPSU, the party of which he was still the general secretary, to give up its monopoly on power. The Soviet leader was in many ways inspired by the events in eastern Europe. He wanted democracy, but he also wanted a strong Communist Party capable of winning elections and defending the achievements of the socialist era. He wanted to devolve power to the republics, but keep the USSR united as a state. On the economy, he wanted foreign loans to help the country back on its feet, and the introduction of gradual market reforms. Remarkably, Gorbachev seemed politically deaf to just how much damage the economic deterioration did to his ability to the lead the Soviet Union. He believed that political reform and the new sense of freedom all over the USSR would make up for the absence of consumer goods, at least in the short term.

On this the Soviet leader was almost certainly wrong. The more Soviet citizens learned about how far behind other countries they were in terms of what they could buy in their shops and markets, the more they blamed Gorbachev and the CPSU leadership for it. Opinions polls, freely conducted in the USSR for the first time, showed that a massive majority of citizens believed that things were getting more difficult and that the weakest were suffering the consequences. Outside of the cities, very few people joined in the political ferment. “We didn’t pay much attention,” said one villager from Volgoda. “Our kolkhoz director would tell us that perestroika and glasnost were important, but why would we believe him? We watched the rallies and speeches on television, but it was nothing to do with our lives.”³³

Meanwhile, in Moscow Gorbachev was facing increasing challenges, even after the Congress of People’s Deputies elected him president of the USSR in March 1990. In the new assembly, opinions were strongly divided between liberals, who believed that Gorbachev was moving too slowly, and conservatives, who thought he was moving too fast. Inside the Communist Party apparatus, many were horrified at how easily Gorbachev had let eastern Europe go and feared that he would also give up on keeping the Soviet Union together. In the Russian Republic, one of the fifteen constituent republics of the USSR, liberal reformers had the upper hand in the republic’s assembly after the elections in the spring of 1990, but, instead of supporting Gorbachev, they elected Boris Yeltsin chairman. Yeltsin engineered a Russian declaration of sovereignty, in which the biggest of the republics, covering three quarters of Soviet territory, declared that the laws of the Russian Republic took precedence over Soviet laws. Yeltsin then in a dramatic speech resigned from the Communist Party of the USSR. At the time, many thought that all of this was mainly showmanship on the part of the flamboyant Yeltsin. But over the months that followed, with other republics following Russia’s example, the issue of Soviet legitimacy became more and more complicated.

At first Gorbachev stood firm. He refused to accept independence for Lithuania or claims of full sovereignty for republics elsewhere. In 1989 the Red Army had used force to break up nationalist demonstrations in Georgia. Twenty people were killed. In January 1990, after months of unrest and ethnic clashes between Azeris and Armenians, Soviet special forces took control of the Azerbaijan capital of Baku against strong Azeri nationalist opposition. The Soviet minister of defense, Dmitrii Iazov, personally directed the operations. At least 130 civilians were killed, along with 30 Red Army soldiers. The bloody crackdown did little to stem Azerbaijan’s drift toward asserting its national sovereignty. But it did, at least temporarily, strengthen Gorbachev’s hand against party hard-liners in the Kremlin.

The image of Gorbachev as a hapless victim of events after the Communist collapse in eastern Europe does not hold up to scrutiny. Gorbachev had wanted the democratization of the eastern European countries and the removal of the Iron Curtain. He also wanted the democratization of the Soviet Union along lines similar to what was happening further west. In the summer of 1990 he made his views clear in a speech to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the Communist Party:

In place of the Stalinist model of socialism we are coming to a citizens’ society of free people. The political system is being transformed radically, genuine democracy with free elections, the existence of many parties and human rights is becoming established and real people’s power is being revived.… The transformation of the super-centralised state into a true union state founded on self-determination and the voluntary unity of the peoples has begun. In place of an atmosphere of ideological dictatorship we have come to freedom of thought and glasnost and openness about information in society.³⁴

But Gorbachev did not just trust his ideals. As events in Georgia and Azerbaijan showed, he still had the loyalty of the Red Army both when he wanted to use force and when he did not want to use it. Subservience to the country’s political leadership was so deeply engrained in the Soviet military that they did not question orders, nor did they assume political responsibilities on their own. The same was true for the KGB. But that organization was increasingly split. Some old-timers, such as KGB chairman Vladimir Kriuchkov, put the preservation of the USSR above all other duties. A younger generation of secret police officers realized both that change was inevitable and that they had skills and information that would serve them well as individuals whatever the outcome of the political struggles at the top. By late 1990 a number of them were in touch with managers of enterprises planning to privatize or with foreigners hoping to invest in a new economy.

Gorbachev’s main problem was therefore not disloyality in the “ministries of power” but the political contest going on within the Soviet leadership. As CPSU general secretary he was increasingly caught between two groups. His liberal advisers—Aleksandr Iakovlev, Georgii Shakhnazarov, Anatolii Cherniaev, and others—wanted him to ditch the Communist Party, call a snap union-wide presidential election, and contest it as a democratic socialist. The top members of his government, the Defense Ministry, and the KGB wanted him to reinstall discipline in the Communist Party and crush the national independence movements. Gorbachev was caught in the middle. He would not give up on the CPSU because he believed it was still key to holding the union together. If not the CPSU, what is there, he challenged his more impatient acolytes. At the same time, he refused to give permission for an all-out assault against the nationalists in the republics. He was willing to authorize crackdowns, but only when ethnic violence or a chance for real secession demanded it. Massive bloodshed was not on the agenda.

In international affairs Gorbachev’s main strategy from 1990 on was to link the Soviet Union more closely to Europe. Like his liberal advisers, he had always seen the Soviet future in Europe, and the liberation of eastern Europe had made a closer connection with the main European countries possible. Gorbachev spoke often, and well, about “a common European home, from the Atlantic to the Urals,” a Gaullist phrase that was intended to appeal to European self-interest in assisting the Soviet transformation. But the Soviet leader knew that the realization of such a concept was inconceivable without a solution to the German problem. Not only was West Germany the major economic power in Europe, but East Germany still stood as a constant reminder of a failed Soviet European policy, in which it had busied itself building walls across the continent instead of tearing them down.

By February 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev had concluded that some form of German unification was inevitable, and that the USSR would be best served by playing a positive role in the process. What made the undertaking speed up beyond what most observers, including most German observers, had imagined possible was the combined effect of the breakdown in the East German economy and the elections there in March 1990. With access to West German products they deemed superior, few people in the east wanted to buy eastern goods anymore. Production stalled. Still, the more expensive consumer items from the west were unobtainable for East Germans because their money was near worthless when exchanged for the deutschmark. In the election more than 40 percent of East Germans voted for Kohl’s CDU—a party that had nearly no base in the east—simply because they thought doing so would speed up unification. The result astonished Europe. With the same party now ruling both East and West Germany, it was clear that unification was not an issue for the future. It was an issue for the here and now.

With Britain’s Margaret Thatcher indignant on the sidelines, all western European leaders fell in step behind President Bush and West German Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl in starting an international process to agree to the conditions for Germany’s full reunification. The so-called “Two-Plus-Four” negotiations (the two Germanies plus the victorious Great Powers from World War II) began in May 1990, with the real sticking points being whether a united Germany could be a member of NATO and the pace and format of the actual unification procedures. To the surprise of the Western powers (and to the dismay of the British and to some extent the French), Gorbachev agreed not only to a united Germany in NATO but also to the process being completed within the year. West German promises of further economic assistance to the USSR helped pave the way. But even more significant was Gorbachev’s conviction that NATO or Germany were no longer enemies of the Soviets. They were friends and partners. In their meeting in July 1990 near Stavropol, where Gorbachev was born, Kohl put it well: “One may not forget history. For without a knowledge of history the present could not be understood nor the future be shaped. Most of those present at this table roughly belonged to his generation—they had still experienced the war as children, too young to become guilty, but old enough to understand. It was the task of this generation to settle some things at the end of this century before passing the baton on to the next generation.”³⁵

Emotional as he was about unification and a new German-Russian relationship, Kohl did not neglect creating facts on the ground to make the unification process irreversible. In the summer of 1990 the deutschmark was made the official currency of East Germany and a full “monetary, economic, and social union” between the two states came into being. West German laws were gradually introduced in East Germany, and in August the East German parliament made a formal request to the West German government to be incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany. Kohl knew such brisk moves would raise criticism even among his Western allies. But he felt it was a risk worth taking. There were still hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers stationed in East Germany. If something happened to Gorbachev, Kohl needed to be able to deal with whatever government replaced him in Moscow.

Right up to the final negotiations in Moscow in September 1990 it was unclear whether all of Germany would be NATO territory and whether Germany would regain its full sovereignty immediately upon reunification. The British, truculent to the finish, insisted on the right of allied NATO troops to enter what would soon be the former East Germany, knowing that the Soviets would turn this down. The veteran West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher would have nothing of these tactics. Himself born in eastern Germany, Genscher wanted no delay in reunification. He insisted on an immediate agreement and on full German sovereignty. Working with the Soviets and the French, Genscher pushed back on the British demands. In the end, the parties agreed to a last-minute fudge: non-German troops would not be permanently stationed or deployed in the east, but the definition of the term “deployed” would be decided by the German government, “in a reasonable and responsible way, taking into consideration the security interests” of each of the powers.³⁶ On 12 September 1990 the Two-Plus-Four Treaty was signed, opening for German unification three weeks later. Even the seasoned diplomat Genscher was moved at the signing: “This is a historic moment for the whole of Europe and a happy one for the Germans. Together we have come a long way in a short time.… On 3 October we Germans will again be living in one democratic state, for the first time in 57 years.… [Now] we want nothing more than to live in freedom, democracy and peace with all other nations.”³⁷

But if German unification seemed almost a miracle in its simplicity and smoothness, trouble was brewing elsewhere in Europe. A bit like in the Soviet Union, the republics of the Yugoslav federation had been drifting apart for several years. But even inside the bigger republics there were ethnic tensions. In Albanian-majority Kosovo, then a part of the Yugoslav Serbian republic, Albanian miners went on strike in 1989 to demand more rights for their community. The Kosovo miners were supported by non-Communist nationalist groups in the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia farther north. In Serbia, the leader of the Communist Party there, Slobodan Milošević, saw the Kosovo demands as yet another attempt at undermining Serbia’s position within Yugoslavia. In a 1989 speech he condemned those who wanted to split Yugoslavia and claimed that the Serbs had sacrificed more than others to keep the country free and united. The concessions “the Serbian leaders made at the expense of their people could not be accepted historically and ethically by any nation in the world, especially because the Serbs have never in the whole of their history conquered and exploited others.”³⁸

But Milošević could not stem the centrifugal forces in Yugoslavia. On the contrary, his own nationalist rhetoric contributed to them. In January 1990 the Slovenian and Croatian Communist parties broke away from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In April free elections in both republics led to non-Communist majorities. In Serbia, on the other hand, Milošević and the now rump Communist Party solidified their hold on power. The scene was set for a showdown. In December 1990 a referendum in Slovenia delivered a 95 percent vote for independence. In Croatia nationalists also won an independence referendum, but substantial non-Croat minorities, among them the fifth of the population who were of Serbian origin, boycotted the vote. When Slovenia and Croatia, with encouragement from a newly reunited Germany, declared full independence the following year, the scene was set for the Yugoslav wars, which devastated the former federal republic over the next ten years. At least 140,000 people died and several million were displaced in the worst warfare in Europe since World War II, wars that the new European institutions altogether failed to stop.

In Moscow Gorbachev was battling on to avoid a similar fate for the Soviet Union. After the deal on Germany, he hoped that West German credits and international political support would help him stabilize the situation internally in the Soviet Union. But until the economy stabilized, Gorbachev’s plan was to hold the Communist Party together through compromises with party traditionalists and with moderate nationalists in the republics. The new CPSU Politburo, elected at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in the summer of 1990, was a mix of the two groups, with very few of the general secretary’s reformist allies onboard. In December 1990, after Gorbachev picked the conservative nonentity Gennadii Ianaev as his vice president, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze resigned, publicly accusing Gorbachev of leading the country back toward a dictatorship. In a rambling speech, Shevardnadze claimed that “nobody knows what this dictatorship will be like, what kind of dictator will come to power and what kind of order will be established.”³⁹ Shevardnadze’s resignation was a hard blow for Gorbachev. The two had worked together to implement perestroika since Gorbachev’s election in 1985. And, worse, the foreign minister was followed out the door in early 1991 by many other reformers, who either resigned or were thrown out by the new party leadership.

In the Russian Republic the increasingly populist Boris Yeltsin made promises of improved services and a better economy if, and only if, Russia took more power for itself within the union. Entirely free from the pressures of compromise and incumbency that dogged Gorbachev, Yeltsin could promise all things to all men, but he was also a shrewd politician who knew that he needed to solidify his position within Russia in preparation for whatever upheavals were to come within the Soviet state. In neighboring Ukraine, the second-largest of the Slavic republics in the USSR, the leader of its parliament Leonid Kravchuk had similar thoughts. Still a member of the Communist Party, Kravchuk was far less willing to attack the Soviet Union than Yeltsin was. But even he had accepted Ukraine’s declaration of full sovereignty in the summer of 1990, a month after Russia. In November the two had signed a separate pact of mutual support and friendship. And when Gorbachev again attempted to use force in the Baltics in January 1991, the leaders of Russia and Ukraine protested jointly. Yeltsin went to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where in usual dramatic fashion he recognized the independence of the Baltic republics and exhorted Russian Red Army soldiers to disobey orders from the Kremlin. In Moscow more than one hundred thousand people marched in support of independence for the Balts.

Besides using the Red Army, Gorbachev had one final method by which he hoped to keep the union together. That was to appeal directly to the people in a referendum. In March 1991, against much resistance among his advisers, both liberal and conservative, he went to the country with the following question: “Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?” It was, to put it mildly, a leading question, and not surprisingly the Balts, the Georgians, and the Armenians refused to participate. But the results in the other republics were still a massive popular vote for the union, with “yes” collecting more than three-quarters of the votes. In Russia 73 percent voted in favor of the union, which perhaps was not surprising given that Russia had constituted the USSR in the first place. But votes in Ukraine (71 percent yes) and in Central Asia (between 95 and 98 percent yes) were surprises, and gave Gorbachev hope as he worked over the summer on revising the union treaty in line with the referendum question.

The Cold War’s central logic had been that one of the Superpowers had to lose for the other to win. For many US leaders this had in reality meant that there could be no lasting peace in the Cold War until the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. But in 1991, as the scenario of a Soviet collapse stopped being entirely implausible, the cautious George H. W. Bush quickly moved away from believing that the end of the USSR would in fact be in the US interest. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was of course already a very different state from that of Stalin. But the real issue was with new challenges arising, also for the United States, as the Cold War receded. In January 1991 the Americans had gone to war against Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Even though he worked hard to avoid war through an Iraqi withdrawal—Iraq was after all an old Soviet ally—Gorbachev sided almost completely with the United States as soon as US operations in the Gulf began. “Our doubts, yours and mine, about Saddam Hussein have proven right,” he told President Bush. “He is the kind of person against whom force is necessary. I have a full understanding of this burden to the nations of the world.”⁴⁰

After the US victory in the Gulf War, Bush’s attention was even more taken by the need for some degree of Soviet stability to help the United States tackle international crises and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Bush began to consider seriously what might happen to Soviet nuclear arsenals if conflict spread inside the USSR. He therefore cold-shouldered Yeltsin and some of the more extreme of Gorbachev’s opponents, even after Yeltsin had been elected president by the people of the Russian Republic in June 1991. During a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, at the beginning of August, Bush spoke to the Ukrainian parliament, which the previous year had declared Ukraine a sovereign republic. “We will maintain the strongest possible relationship with the Soviet Government of President Gorbachev,” Bush told the Ukrainians. “Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism.” Bush hoped that the Soviet “Republics will combine greater autonomy with greater voluntary interaction—political, social, cultural, economic—rather than pursuing the hopeless course of isolation.”⁴¹ Nationalist Ukrainians were flabbergasted and angry, and in Washington conservatives referred to Bush’s address as the “Chicken Kiev speech.” But for the US president Soviet dissolution now seemed more dangerous than Soviet power, with the potential for civil and interstate wars breaking out on a vast scale across Eurasia. That these fears were not realized is something we now take for granted, but it was not necessarily the case that the Soviet bloc would on the whole avoid the eventual fate of Yugoslavia.

As Gorbachev prepared to put his signature to the new union treaty, he had reason to be cautiously optimistic about the future of his balancing act. Gorbachev thought that it would all come down to the economy: with the union secured within a new framework, gradual economic reform would proceed, helped by European, American, and Asian investments. Gorbachev foresaw a future split in the Communist Party, both at the union and the republic levels, with himself leading an all-union socialist party that he hoped would compete successfully within a democratic system. On 4 August 1991 the general secretary went on vacation to the Crimea, as he had done every year since he came to office. He expected to finish his work on the new union treaty while there.

Two weeks later Moscow awoke to news that a nationwide state of emergency had been declared. Gorbachev, said the news bulletins, had gone on sick leave. In his place, a government committee, headed by Vice President Ianaev, was in charge. Muscovites, and the whole country, had little doubt that there had been a coup d’état. In Moscow, citizens took to the streets, meeting in front of the Russian parliament building, where Yeltsin and his advisers had barricaded themselves. Censorship was reintroduced and leaders of the opposition arrested by the KGB. Paratroopers took up positions at key intersections.

In reality Gorbachev was kept prisoner in his Crimean dacha. The day before the coup was announced, a delegation, including his own chief of staff, had been sent by the plotters to demand his acquiescence to their plans. Gorbachev had refused. He had known that the KGB and the military had been preparing plans to crack down on unrest in the republics, but had never thought they would act against him. With Gorbachev’s refusal, the plotters’ plans started to go awry even before they had been announced. In the late afternoon on the day of the coup, the commander of a tank battalion sent to disperse the crowds in front of the Russian parliament declared his loyalty to the Russian Republic. Yeltsin climbed on top of one of the tanks and denounced the takeover. “We are dealing with a rightist, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup,” Yeltsin shouted. “Such methods of force are unacceptable. They… return us to the Cold War era along with the Soviet Union’s isolation in the world community.… I call on all Russians to give a dignified answer to the putschists and demand that the country be returned to normal constitutional order.”⁴² It was his finest hour. Some of his aides commented, not incorrectly, that it was the role Yeltsin was born to play.

From then on everything went wrong for the coup-makers. The Moscow curfew they tried to impose was not observed. More and more barricades went up in the capital. Military units were reluctant to follow orders. The KGB hesitated. Leaders in the republics did not return their calls. From inside the Russian parliament—the Belyi Dom, or White House, as it was called in Russian—Boris Yeltsin organized the resistance. He announced the setting up of Russian, as distinct from Soviet, armed forces and appointed himself commander in chief. On the third day the members of the government committee simply gave up. Some flew to the Crimea to meet with Gorbachev, who greeted them with ice-cold contempt. Others simply slunk away and were later arrested by the police. Boris Pugo, the interior minister, and his wife committed suicide, as did Gorbachev’s chief military aide, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, who had offered his services to the committee.

Gorbachev flew back to Moscow on a plane sent by the Russian leaders. His mood was grim. His wife, Raisa, his closest friend and ally, had collapsed during their incarceration, suffering from hypertension. He thought about all those whom he had appointed to high office who had betrayed him. On arrival he went home to make sure Raisa was properly looked after. It was a very human thing to do, but it was a dreadful political mistake. It disappointed his supporters who had put their lives on the line for him, and allowed Yeltsin to take political control of Moscow. The Russian president worked through the night. When Gorbachev reported for duty the next day, Russia was already taking over the USSR.

Yeltsin’s first order was to suspend all activities of the CPSU on Russian territory. Party offices were closed and the Central Committee building in Moscow sealed. Its archives and documents were taken over by Yeltsin loyalists. The head of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov, who had been among the coup-plotters, was arrested and the KGB was later dissolved. Hundreds of KGB officers inside the headquarters at Lubianka first thought the angry crowds would storm the building. Instead Muscovites were diverted by the sight of cranes, ordered there by Yeltsin, dismembering the statue of Feliks Dzherzhinskii, the founder of the secret police, in the square outside. In the Kremlin Yeltsin forced Gorbachev to rescind his appointments of new heads of the Soviet military and the security service, and appoint officers close to Yeltsin instead. When Gorbachev appeared before the Russian parliament to thank them for their fortitude, he was heckled by the representatives and openly mocked by Yeltsin, who signed further orders to outlaw CPSU activities in the general secretary’s presence. When Gorbachev claimed, from the rostrum, that he could not determine the full extent of the CPSU’s culpability in the coup because he had not yet read the relevant documents, Yeltsin walked across the podium with transcripts from party meetings. “Read this!” said the Russian president, and forced Gorbachev to read out to the assembly evidence of how his Communist colleagues had betrayed him.⁴³ Power was palpably shifting in the USSR.

The final drama of the Cold War became a purely Soviet tragedy. As Yeltsin worked with other leaders in the republics to set up a new commonwealth of sovereign states, bypassing the USSR entirely, Gorbachev’s power waned. After the coup, he resigned as general secretary and did not challenge Yeltsin’s wholesale expropriation of the CPSU’s funds and properties in Russia. In September 1991 the Congress of People’s Deputies, the elected union assembly Gorbachev had invested so much faith in as a new democratic parliament of the USSR, dissolved itself. Politics in the republics was taking precedence, also for the politicians. The Baltic states had already reestablished themselves as fully independent countries during the August coup. In the Central Asian republics, so unwilling to see the Soviet Union go in March, national elites coming out of the Communist Party declared full sovereignty during the autumn of 1991. Their situation was similar to the effects of British or French decolonization thirty years earlier: the imperial center gave up ruling, and therefore local elites set up new states based, in main part, on lessons learned during the late imperial era. The last nail in the Soviet coffin was the 1 December referendum in Ukraine, in which the population voted overwhelmingly for full independence.

Throughout all of this Gorbachev could have tried to use force to keep the union together. He was still the president of the USSR. He himself believed that the Red Army would have obeyed him, as would, at least up to a point, the security services. But he steadfastly refused to do so. To him, an involuntary union was no alternative to a Soviet Union. He repeatedly told his diminishing group of advisers—now again mainly his old liberal friends—that using force would endanger everything they had stood for. He would not preside over a dictatorship; he would rather see the union disappear and be replaced by some form of confederation, as Gorbachev believed was Yeltsin’s aim. Maybe it could prevent the USSR turning into another Yugoslavia, where civil wars were now already raging. Also, Gorbachev was exhausted. After the betrayal by people to whom he had been close, and with his beloved wife ill, even he did not have the strength to fight on.

On 8 December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met secretly at a government guest house in the Belavezha Forest near the Polish-Belorussian border. They met there because all of them still feared that the security services, on Gorbachev’s orders, would show up to arrest them. In the document they hastily signed, the Soviet Union was dissolved in a subclause, in which the three simply ascertained “that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality no longer exists.” Instead they set up a Commonwealth of Independent States, which other Soviet republics could join at will. They pledged to cooperate politically and economically, to extend the same rights to everyone residing in their respective republics, irrespective of their national origin, and to fully respect the territorial integrity of each other and of all countries.⁴⁴Russia ratified the treaty on 12 December, the same day as it withdrew from the Soviet Union. Within weeks Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan had all joined the new commonwealth.

After some last-minute hesitation, Gorbachev decided to resign as Soviet president. In a televised resignation speech to the Soviet people in the evening on 25 December, the president said that he had fought for “the preservation of the union state and the integrity of this country.” But

developments took a different course. The policy prevailed of dismembering this country and disuniting the state, which is something I cannot subscribe to.… Destiny so ruled that when I found myself at the helm of this state it already was clear that something was wrong.… [It] was going nowhere and we could not possibly live the way we did. We had to change everything radically.… An effort of historical importance has been carried out. The totalitarian system has been eliminated, which prevented this country from becoming a prosperous and well-to-do country a long time ago.… I am positive that sooner or later, some day, our common efforts will bear fruit and our nations will live in a prosperous, democratic society. I wish everyone all the best.⁴⁵

Before broadcasting his speech, Gorbachev had called President Bush and explained what would happen. Soviet nuclear weapons were safe, he told him. Authority would be transferred to Yeltsin immediately. His usual noncommittal self, Bush responded to Gorbachev’s emotional Christmas Day call by speaking in generalities, as if to a public meeting: “And so, at this time of year and at this historic time, we salute you and thank you for what you have done for world peace. Thank you very much.”⁴⁶

As Gorbachev finished his televised address, his military aides carrying the suitcases with the nuclear codes stole quietly away, looking for their new boss in another part of the Kremlin. Gorbachev went alone to the Walnut Room, where members of the Soviet Politburo had often met, for a drink with five of his closest aides. Then, before midnight, he went home, as ex-president of a former country.⁴⁷

THE DISSOLUTION OF the Soviet Union removed the last vestige of the Cold War as an international system. For two generations it had dominated international affairs, and the ideological struggle that preceded it and on which it fed had lasted even longer. As in most great changes in world politics, the end was sudden but the antecedents were long. As a dominant aspect in human affairs, the Cold War had ailed for some time, at least since profound global economic and political changes began in the mid-1970s. But the Soviet collapse brought it to a definite conclusion. There was no country left to challenge the United States globally in the name of a radically different ideology. Conflicts and tensions that had grown from the Cold War would remain, as would its nightmarish weapons and curbed strategies, but time had moved on, and new forms of global interaction had taken the place of the old.