After forty years the Warsaw Pact was menaced by torchlight vigils, contested elections, leaked Central Committee disputes. The security fence along the Austrian–Hungarian border was rumoured cut; in Budapest and Belgrade, Red control tottered, government speeches sabotaged by wrecked microphones, soot-bombs, fireworks, swathes of empty seats. Public mirth demoralized a Russian minister, sent to Warsaw to strengthen the regime, at a meeting of Gratitude to Our Protector and Brother. Turning to thank the chairman for an occasion solemn, inspiring, nay, historical, he awoke the assembly by revealing a note with Missing Goods glued to his trousers.
Tallinn newspaper warnings slammed us in thick headlines but could not disguise the extraordinary. Gorbachev flying to Bonn and acknowledging the freedom of all European states to choose their rulers. Counter-attacking, the Stasi ordering barricades against the West, doubling the defences on the anti-Fascist barrier, the Wall, while street violence paralysed transport and electricity. Leipzig was in uproar, a general strike immobilized Czechoslovakia, accompanied by angry slogans from the French Revolution, its own bicentenary celebrations making topical the seizure of the Bastille, invasion of a palace, lynching of ministers. Agitation was fermented at news of the Chinese People’s Army shooting down young democrats in Tiananmen Square. The Lithuanian Reform Movement, Sajudis, despite militia bullets, was parading for democratic independence and distributing lists of the deported, tortured, shot. The Latvian Popular Front risked proclaiming imminent secession from Russia.
At the Hotel Splendide, Russian heavies, silent, glum, heard that the Estonian Civic Committee, created almost overnight, had reiterated over a secret radio that no nation could be guilty of reneging on what it had never agreed, that the 1939 Secret Protocol signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop was illegal, that Estonian independence had been guaranteed by Lenin himself. A general, shouting that God had spoken and given believers wings, jumped from a lofty window and survived, uninjured.
Soviet patrols still guarded key centres, tensely, fortified by assurances that Russian tanks would soon relieve them.
That autumn, with a crash that shook the world, the Berlin Wall was stormed, East German Party dictatorship punctured. In turbulent Bucharest, Ceausescu decreed martial law, but the army sided with the rioters. I almost expected a postcard from Alex, gleefully recounting the brute’s exclamation when his wife, pitiless Elena, was led to the firing squad, ‘But she’s a graduate!’
In Ragnarok, twilight of gods and monsters, the ancient writ had sounded:
The monolithic Soviet state, even to expert political forecasters, had appeared immovable. Now, as the Eastern Bloc collapsed, Moscow itself was shaky.
In Tallinn, counter-attack by the pro-Russian National Salvation Committee was suppressed, and, on Christmas Eve, Edgar Savisor, whatever his private convictions, broadcast to the nation, ‘We know that war will not free us from the Soviet Union. Nor can money buy deliverance. Only wisdom and shrewdness.’
For the first time since 1941 the Christian Maple ousted the Soviet New Year Fir. Few were unmoved by the Kremlin’s sudden admission of the invalidity of the Secret Protocol.
Formal Baltic independence must be very near, despite threat of economic sanctions, blockade, even Red Army intervention. Nevertheless, Soviet military, hitherto stiff, with jungle-cat menace, were attempting joviality, joining the rest of us at television or bar-side radio. Estonians, too, were relinquishing suet impenetrability, jerking out sardonic jokes about communism and capitalism as techniques, rival but identical, to deceive, impoverish and boast.
Censorship lapsing, new dailies appeared, and old-style politicians emerged from cellars, sewers, barges, woods, into crisp, snowy air. Ideas were mangled in cafés, where we heard of the deaths of Irving Berlin and Samuel Beckett, the American President’s dislike of broccoli, the demise of apartheid, British acid-house raves, then, from a dozen capitals, the announcement that the Cold War had ended.
Notwithstanding this, my dreams, drained of sexuality, were of Soviet Terror, bears with swollen eyes and razor claws, cut-throat gangs, for Russians had invaded Lithuania, were attacking Vilnius, corpses piling around Television Tower. Another report, sedulously detailed though untrue, was of the assassination of the Latvian Minister of the Interior.
Tallinn remained quiet, though purposeful. In January, with Baltic revolts crushed, Gorbachev unexpectedly flew to Vilnius, watched by immense crowds, utterly silent but, he would have observed, not apathetic. That night he broadcast, emphatic but ambiguous. ‘My fate is linked with the Baltic Republics. I pledge myself to resolve certain mutual obligations and explore the rights of secession.’
This was largely ridiculed by nationalists as pap for the United Nations and the European Union, but before departure he aroused some street applause, not noisy but hopeful.
Expectation was all, a dusty jewel emitting random flashes. By summer, with Marxist obdurates abstaining or fled, the Supreme Estonian Soviet, to crashing cheers and in collusion with Lithuania, declared the restoration of full independence. Red dissidents attempted a march but were howled off by the populace, supported by the KGB itself, which forthwith abandoned its prisons and offices, their doors already painted ‘Sty for Sale’. The giant watch-tower zone on the Gulf of Finland bloodlessly surrendered.
For two tense days we awaited reprisals from Red battalions still stationed at ports, air bases, industrial centres, but they stayed in barracks. Back in Moscow and in another mood, Gorbachev threatened economic sanctions, withdrawal of supplies, even bombs, but hesitated at hostile reactions from the United Nations.
Tallinn, Tartu, Narva hoisted national banners, and no commissar or general stirred. History was pausing only for fresh breath. Popular fronts were swearing to defend the Baltic Way, the international press repeating Savisor’s invective against what he had long defended but now denounced as ‘the Criminal and Unlawful 1939 Pact’.
Yet, despite Red Army immobility, rumours of coercion persisted. Frontier conflicts, long-range bombers assembling outside Leningrad, Kremlin admission of bloodshed at Baku, where ethnic dissent fermented secession movements throughout Azerbaijan, all incited nationalists and ex-communists to coalesce, with reckless demands for a congress of fifteen Soviet Republics, then declared the formation of a Baltic Council, briefed to demand the removal of all Soviet troops and the ratification of Baltic independence.
Ignoring this, Moscow confessed ‘strategic withdrawals’ in East Germany and Poland, though, more prominently, reporting drug-smuggling in Florida, persecution of Cubans seeking protection from Castro, British and Israeli subsidies for Kashmiri communal hatreds, Manchester prison riots.
At a Kremlin warning of a Red Putsch in the Baltic, thousands from the three republics massed on their Russian borders, had already formed the Great Chain, unarmed but determined, hands clasping in the intoxication of cohesion and victory.