27. Restoration
As Goebbels, bombs raining down on his ministry, and the Russians liberating Auschwitz, had noted in his diaries, when he heard about the Yalta conference, the real battle between the Allies had not been about Poland; it had been about Germany. So it was, and forty years later the Yalta settlement was starting to unravel, beginning, for that matter, with Poland. However, the crucial decisions were taken in Moscow, as a clever Hungarian had predicted, back in 1956. The 27th Congress of the Party, held at the turn of February/March 1986, was the stage. At the time, no-one really noticed what was happening: the proceedings of the Congress amounted to the usual tidal wave of liquid concrete. The Party rewrote its statutes, modifying earlier remarks as to class war and imperialism. Even Xan Smiley, astutest of the foreign correspondents, and the Economist did not notice that something decisive had happened — a forgivable mistake (this writer has reason to hope), given the needle-in-haystack nature of truth in that system. But what was really meant was that Moscow was giving up the Berlin Wall. Within months, Solidarność was discussing a new Poland, and within a few more months the Berlin Wall had indeed gone, and so, thereafter, did everything else go, including, by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. There was a romantic theory that this had been achieved by ‘We, the People’, a theory that could only elicit a chuckle from the grave of Andropov. The people were Mussorgsky extras, in an operetta where Polish pretenders made trouble for Old Believers. The Politburo were stupefied by Poland: they would not send in troops, and knew that their Polish puppets were lost: what were you to do with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, marching on their knees, to a religious symbol? If the proletariat went on strike against the Communists, how were you to deal with it?
Martial law had been declared at the end of 1981, and had solved nothing: Poland still had the debts, and after a week or two the black market ran things as before. In effect it was the Pope (with the American embassy) that now ran affairs. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. If he had called for a revolution, it would have happened. He did not. The virtues of capitalism and democracy did not much interest him and in 1984 Jaruzelski himself said that the Church was an ally. There was a curious aspect, that many of the people in the Reagan administration were Catholic: Haig’s brother was a priest, and there was William Casey at the CIA. Oleg Bogomolov, for the Institute of Socialist Relations, had written a report in 1978 about what the Pope would do. It is worth noting that both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with Ukrainian involvement, disliked the Uniates as fake. John Paul went again in 1987 and three quarters of a million people attended the Mass at Gdańsk. There had been a referendum on economic reform, boycotted at the behest of Solidarność, and strikes had followed in the spring (1988). Lech Wałęsa was needed, and in January 1989 he appeared on television again. Mieczysław Rakowski took over as prime minister, and in February 1989 there was a round table over the price increases. The elections then occurred in June, and by now Gorbachev and the Pope were co-operating. Gorbachev informed Cardinal Agostino Casaroli in Moscow in the ineffable words: ‘The most important thing is the human being. The human being must be at the centre of international relations. That is the point of departure for our New Thinking.’ And he did release the Lithuanian Cardinal Vincentas Sladkevičius, after twenty-five years in prison. In return he had a present: the Virgin of Fatima had promised that Russia would be freed. In the summer of 1989 Poland acquired a non-Communist government, the members of which undertook to leave the Communists alone. Opinions greatly varied as to the wisdom of this, and Alain Besançon made himself unpopular, as he talked of another Convention of Targowice, or sell-out. But was there a serious alternative? Gorbachev, by now doing the rounds of ‘our common European home’, had to act over Poland, and if the Church and the Americans pushed the Poles towards a compromise element, so be it. But he would also have to get rid of ugly, tiresome little Honecker as well.
Poland was really about Germany, and another important People’s Democracy also supervened. Act two was set in Hungary. János Kádár, the general secretary, had promised some economic liberalization and had impressed Mitterrand. Hungary had always had a strange relationship with Austria, and Austria was now, in her way, a considerable success story. Why was Budapest, capital of what was in the end a rather more interesting civilization, such a lifeless ruin? Something of an effort was made to do something with Budapest, and at least the Váci utca and the old Gerbeaud café were very smudgy copies of the Herrengasse and the Sacher in Vienna, though if you went two or three tram stops down the Rákóczy út you were well and truly in the Communist bloc. Kádár was a prime opportunist, and the Russians needed him: he was very adept at making sure that he had no obvious successor. Besides, there was an enormous and very influential Hungarian diaspora, and after Ostpolitik its members came back and forth — latterly in the shape of George Soros. Hungary built up the largest per capita dollar debt in the world, $2bn, but the industrial showcases were not a success. In the recession of the early 1980s exports to the West ran down, and half of the earnings were needed just to pay the debt interest. Wages were blocked, there was notable inflation, and purchasing power fell by 15 per cent. Hungary had a degree of liberalization, Kádár announcing that who was not against was for, and there were opposition movements, with openings in the press. By 1985 there were public meetings, and in 1987 when Kádár was already 75 there was something of a turning point: the state enterprises were allowed to charge their own prices, but on the other side personal taxes were introduced. Imre Pozsgay circulated a document by the main economists, saying that the regime had led the country to near disaster, and in March 1988 — the anniversary of the revolution in 1848 — thousands of demonstrators gathered in Budapest. Viktor Orbán started to make his reputation as orator (and eventual prime minister). At the next Party conference, Kádár himself was voted out, and at another anniversary, the execution of Imre Nagy in 1958, the end of the Party itself was spelled out. Nagy had said that he feared being rehabilitated by his own executioners and that is what happened: the Communists shed their name and carried on as social democrats, or even as liberals.