The people of the Eastern Bloc who had always hoped for change were now demanding it. They wanted an end to the secret police and its army of informers, the right to worship, the freedom to travel, the right to better economic conditions, to better housing. The right, in short, to a better life.
The first evidence that change was in the air took place in Czechoslovakia with a mass demonstration. The government, acting without Soviet aid, crushed the protest, arresting, among many, Václav Havel. Hungary was the first to take the walk towards freedom, its government allowing the formation of alternative political parties and cutting down the barbed-wire frontier along the Austrian border. June 1989 saw the reburial and state funeral of Imre Nagy, the reformist Hungarian leader, executed on the orders of the Kremlin following the failed Hungarian Uprising thirty-three years before. In October, Gorbachev agreed to withdraw Soviet tanks from the country. Within a year, Hungary held its first round of free elections. In Poland, after a ban of seven years, the government recognized Solidarity. In August 1989, a million protesters formed a human chain 430 miles long linking the three capitals of the Baltic states Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn.
In May 1989, Gorbachev visited China to improve the still-frosty relations between the two communist superpowers. While the Chinese leaders talked of reform, the youth demanded it, coming out in force on the streets of Beijing, congregating in Tienanmen Square. It was only after Gorbachev’s departure that the authorities sent in the tanks and crushed the rebellion with extreme force. But would Gorbachev resort to such measures? His UN speech only six months before implied not.
While China used old-fashioned brutality, the first communist regime fell through the ballot box. Poland’s first post-war free elections returned a 99 per cent vote for Solidarity. When the Polish communists rang Moscow for advice, Gorbachev advised that it was time to ‘yield power’. On 24 August 1989, the first non-communist government in post-war eastern Europe came into power. Communism in Poland was dead. In July 1989, George Bush, Senior, as the new president, visited Poland and Hungary and praised their first steps towards democracy.
By the autumn of 1989 almost 15,000 East Germans had taken a ‘holiday’ to Hungary and from there crossed the frontier, now stripped of its barbed wire, into Austria and the West. Other East Germans crammed into the West German embassy in Hungary seeking asylum. In October, the East German government tried to ignore these embarrassments as Gorbachev visited for the regime’s fortieth anniversary celebrations. Erich Honecker, the last of the communist hardliners, raised his glass and talked of East Germany’s prosperity. On their official walks the crowd shouted out to Gorbachev, ‘Gorby, save us, save us!’ In the East German city of Leipzig demonstrators chanted, ‘We are the people.’ Honecker dismissed Gorbachev’s suggestions for reform. Talking to Honecker, Gorbachev said later, was like ‘throwing peas against a wall’. In Leipzig, Honecker ordered the police to open fire. But they refused. In the political fallout, Honecker, leader for eighteen years, was forced to resign.
On 4 November, a rock concert designed to support the East German regime became a public platform denigrating the party and demanding not reform but full democracy. On 9 November, Egon Krenz, Honecker’s brief successor, announced that from the following day, East Berliners could apply for visas to visit West Berlin. In itself this was a massive concession but the crowds, already congregating at the wall, asked why wait for visas. The border guards, under immense pressure from the crowds, opened the gates. A trickle stepped tentatively through, followed by more. Soon the trickle had become a torrent. People climbed the wall and began hacking at it as the world watched on television. After twenty-eight years the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War, had come down.
The Berlin Wall, 1989
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1990-0105-029 / Reiche, Hartmut / CC-BY-SA
Within days the dreaded secret police force, the Stasi, was disbanded. Within four months, East Germany held its first free election since 1946. As with forty-five years earlier, the communists were convincingly beaten. This time, however, they were finished. Seven months later, on 3 October 1990, East and West Germany no longer existed. After forty-one years as a country artificially split into two, Germany was a reunified nation.
Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, events now moved on their own momentum. In Bulgaria, the hardline communists were deposed by reformist communists, who themselves were voted out within a year. In Czechoslovakia, a demonstration on 17 November in Prague’s Wenceslas Square was shot upon, but further demonstrations attracted increasingly larger numbers. The police couldn’t shoot them all. Dubček, the instigator of the Prague Spring twenty-two years before, spoke to the crowds, as did the future president, Václav Havel, recently released from another spell in prison. The ‘Velvet Revolution’ brought down the government, who, realizing that no help would be forthcoming from Moscow, knew their situation was untennable. Two years later, in 1992, Czechoslovakia, an artificially created country following the First World War, was no more, split into two separate states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Nicolae Ceauşescu and Erich Honecker, November 1988
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1988-1117-026 / Mittelstädt, Rainer / CC-BY-SA
In Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu (pictured above, on the left next to Honecker), president for the previous fifteen years, argued against reform and walked out of talks with Gorbachev and other new enlightened leaders within the Eastern Bloc. Demonstrations broke out across the country, the police shooting several people. On 22 December, Ceauşescu delivered a speech from the balcony of his presidential palace in Bucharest. Designed to garner support for his regime, he had it televised, but the reaction he received was far from what he expected. Booed and heckled, he broke off his speech halfway, and with his wife and deputy prime minister, Elena, fled by helicopter. Caught three days later, on Christmas Day 1989, the Ceauşescus were put through a brief show trail, then executed. Television footage of their bodies was seen throughout the world.
Only in Yugoslavia was there widespread and protracted violence. Another artificial country thrown together in 1918, Yugoslavia was made up of several republics. Following the Second World War it was held together by the popular Tito. But following Tito’s death in May 1980, regional and ethnic rivalries sprung up which, after the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, led to a vicious civil war which saw ethnic cleansing and genocide, requiring the intervention of UN forces and NATO.