In such gatherings, Gorbachev sometimes gave voice to scathing attacks on Ronald Reagan, portraying him as unsophisticated and belligerent. Subsequently, and in other settings, Gorbachev was full of praise for Reagan, but that was not what he told his Eastern European colleagues, at least not during his early years. “His assessments of Reagan at the time were totally different from the things that he said later,” recalled Egon Krenz, the East German Politburo member who attended the 1987 Warsaw Pact meeting in East Berlin as a top aide to Honecker and two years later became, briefly, Honecker’s successor. Krenz said Gorbachev “used to tell us that Reagan was an old man who had a simplified view of the world, who intellectually couldn’t follow him.”2
The pretense of Communist solidarity prevailed. Yet under the surface there were tensions. By mid-1987, Gorbachev was moving in new directions. After two years in office, he had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t achieve his aims—reviving the Soviet economy, easing the arms race with the United States, forging a new relationship with Western Europe—unless he also carried out far-reaching reforms inside the Soviet Union. “Gorbachev was coming to the realization that our success in foreign affairs—where things seemed to gain momentum—was correlated with our domestic situation,” wrote his principal foreign-policy adviser, Anatoly S. Chernyaev.3
Gorbachev assumed that he could accomplish these reforms under the leadership of the Communist Party, and that doing so would not jeopardize either the party or the socialist system. The goal was to breathe new life into that system by relaxing the top-down, command approach to the economy, by opening the way for dissent, and by encouraging a freer flow of information. The policy of glasnost (openness) took hold in the months after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in April 1986, which demonstrated that Soviet officials had gone to great lengths, and in dangerous ways, to conceal information. Soviet media were encouraged to become more lively and to write about problems in the Soviet Union rather than pretend they didn’t exist. Gorbachev pushed for major changes in personnel too. “Chernobyl showed to Gorbachev that there was a level of officials who cheated him, who didn’t tell him the truth,” recalled Anatoly Adamishin, a deputy foreign minister. “So he decided to change the upper middle levels [of government].”4
On December 16, 1986, to dramatize the new political climate, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, Andrei Sakharov, to return to Moscow from seven years of internal exile in the closed city of Gorky. Sakharov, the physicist who once had been in charge of Soviet development of the hydrogen bomb, was for decades a staunch advocate for freedom of speech and for demilitarization of Soviet foreign policy. At the beginning of 1987, at a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee, Gorbachev spoke openly, though vaguely, about the possibility of choosing officials through elections with secret ballots. “Democracy is not the opposite of order,” he said in one speech that winter. “It is order of a greater degree, based not on implicit obedience, mindless execution of instructions, but on full-fledged active participation by all the community in all society’s affairs.”5
Gorbachev’s domestic reforms were deeply unsettling to other Communist leaders in Eastern Europe. Their own power had long been based on maintaining the same control over dissent and political opposition as the Soviet Union had established. In Prague, where the Soviet Union had sent troops to crush a brief movement toward liberalization in 1968, a mordant joke began making the rounds that perhaps it was time for Czechoslovakia to send some “fraternal assistance” to the Soviet Union.6
The impact of the changes in the Soviet Union hit particularly hard in East Germany, where Honecker had remained atop the Communist Party hierarchy since 1971. Other Eastern European officials paid lip service to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. “What is taking place in the Soviet Union is correct, completely correct, and must fully be supported,” said Vasil Bilak, the hard-line ideologist for Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party.7 By contrast, Honecker and his aides made clear that they had no intention of following down the road of glasnost.
In the spring of 1987, Kurt Hager, the East German Communist official in charge of culture and ideology, was asked about Gorbachev’s reforms. “If your neighbor decided to repaper the walls of his house, would you feel bound to repaper your home, too?” Hager retorted.8 Honecker’s regime moved to censor the coverage in the East German press of developments inside the Soviet Union. Frank Herold, who served from 1984 to 1988 as the Moscow correspondent for the East German Communist Party organ Neues Deutschland , later recalled that in his last two years there, he was barred from reporting about what was happening in political and intellectual life, because the subjects were too sensitive and too threatening to Honecker’s regime. “I only covered science, sports and fine arts, no politics at all,” Herold said.9
For ordinary East Germans, it was especially demoralizing to see that even the Soviet Union was opening up, while their own government was not. Even though they could not read about Gorbachev’s reforms in East German newspapers, they could hear the reports about them from other sources, such as West German, British, and American radio stations. “Gorbachev had a very strong echo within the East German population,” recalled Bettina Urbanski, who in 1987 was serving as the editor in charge of socialist countries for the East Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung. “The more he moved towards reform, the more restrictive the [East German] government became, both internally and externally in insisting on the wall.”10 Lothar de Maizière, the attorney and Lutheran Church leader who would briefly serve as East Germany’s prime minister after the fall of the wall, said he felt that the turning point in East Germany’s collapse came in 1986 and 1987. “It was clear Honecker was not going to follow Gorbachev,” Maizière said. “At the time, I was active in the Protestant Church, and we were trying to keep people from leaving the country, telling them they could help bring about change. But people didn’t believe it any more.”11
At the meeting in East Berlin, Gorbachev unveiled another significant change to the Eastern European leaders. This one concerned not domestic policy but military doctrine. The Warsaw Pact, it was announced, would henceforth be considered a strictly defensive alliance. Its members would never start a war or strike first with nuclear weapons. They had no territorial ambitions in or out of Europe. Warsaw Pact nations “do not regard any individual government or group of people as their enemy,” they declared in a written statement that was released on May 28, 1987.12 For Eastern European leaders such as Honecker, this new doctrine meant that they were less able than in the past to justify repressive policies at home. How could they justify a hard line on the basis of an external threat if there was no longer an enemy?