EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last installment in a five-part series excerpted from William F. Buckley Jr.’s The Fall of the Berlin Wall. The fourth installment is here, the third is here, the second is here; the first is here.
Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria was the senior surviving secretary general in the Eastern Bloc. He had begun his iron rule in 1954, just one year after the death of Stalin. Now the shock waves reached even his country. On November 3 there was a demonstration in Sofia. It was sponsored by an illegal environmental group, Eco-Glasnost, and nine thousand people took part.
That figure was pathetic by standards recently set in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. In Zhivkov’s redoubt it was earth-shaking. On November 10, Zhivkov stunned his Central Committee colleagues by resigning from both the Party leadership and the presidency. His hastily chosen successor, Foreign Minister Petar Mladenov, announced quickly that there was “no alternative to restructuring.” He cautioned, though, that changes would take place “only within the framework of socialism, in the name of socialism, and on the road to socialism.” But by the end of the year, seven weeks later, the Central Committee had renounced the Party’s monopoly on power, and Mladenov had scheduled talks with the newborn Union of Democratic Forces.
That left one holdout, apart from the Soviet Union itself: Romania. A Romanian-born bicycle repairman in San Diego echoed the disbelief of the Czech waiter in New York. “I’m so happy for the Germans and the Czechs. But of course nothing like that could happen in Romania, not till Ceausescu dies. He has too tight a hold–the people are too afraid of him.”
Until the mid-Sixties, Romania had been, so to speak, an ordinary, well-behaved Soviet satellite. Under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania was totalitarian, but a state in which there was some room to maneuver. When Gheorghiu-Dej died and Nicolae Ceausescu took over, he set about closing up that room. He strengthened and molded the Securitate, the secret police. They were now the equivalent of the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB. He instituted his “systemization” program. Rural villages were destroyed, peasant families forcibly relocated. This anti-kulak-style program was to lead to grand new agricultural collectives, which, however, never materialized. Agricultural production dropped catastrophically. Much of what was produced was sold abroad to acquire the funds necessary to maintain the Securitate.
Ceausescu also generated a massive personality cult. His picture was everywhere, printed on posters, woven into tapestries, painted on walls. In Bucharest nine thousand houses and sixteen historic churches were bulldozed in order to create the Boulevard of the Socialist Victory–an eight-lane road sweeping up to the Palace of Parliament. Before World War II and the Communist takeover, Bucharest had been the most elegant city in the region. Now, British journalist Anthony Daniels remarked that Ceausescu seemed determined to turn the Paris of the Balkans into the Pyongyang of the Balkans.
Ceausescu was not prepared to go quietly, like Zhivkov. When opposition started to emerge, Ceausescu moved quickly to cut it down. In March 1989, a group of retired Party and government officials published an open letter accusing him of human-rights violations and demanding an end to the systemization program. All six signatories were arrested. Efforts to communicate with them were blocked.
Then, in December, protests broke out in Timisoara, a city in the Transylvanian region, near Romania’s borders with Hungary and Yugoslavia. The protests were sparked by government harassment of the Rev. Laszlo Tokes, a Protestant minister who had been set upon and stabbed by a band of masked men, almost certainly members of the Securitate. On December 16 the protests evolved into a full-scale demonstration. Ceausescu reacted as Honecker had intended to react to the marchers in Leipzig. Army and Securitate forces, including tank and helicopter units, moved in and started firing. The death toll was estimated at an extraordinary four thousand. The United States, Britain, Poland, and even the Soviet Union issued protests. Ceausescu was not in Bucharest to receive them. He was in Iran, going ahead with a scheduled state visit.
On December 20, Ceausescu returned to Bucharest and blasted the “fascists” and “terrorists” who were stirring up dissent. The next day at noon he stood on the balcony of the Palace of Parliament to address his people. Television cameras captured the astonishment on his face when his people began to boo and jeer him. Securitate forces swung into action to disperse the crowd. The first casualties were two young men crushed beneath an armored car. Fighting continued through the night, with an estimated forty dead in Bucharest and another thirty in Cluj, a small city in Transylvania. But as protests erupted in other parts of the country, reports came in that Army units were refusing to help the Securitate suppress them.
On the morning of December 22, Radio Bucharest announced that Defense Minister Vasile Milea had committed suicide. Neither foreign diplomats in Bucharest nor the Romanian General Staff believed it: they suspected that Milea had been killed by Securitate officers in retaliation for the Army’s failure to support them.
That may have been the decisive event. When a hundred fifty thousand protesters gathered later that day in Bucharest’s University Square, the Army actively joined them in beating back the Securitate. The insurgents captured the Palace of Parliament, the Central Committee headquarters, and other government buildings. That evening the liberated Radio Bucharest announced the formation of the National Salvation Front, which would include Laszlo Tokes and General Stefan Gusa, chief of the General Staff.
Soon after the announcement, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who had fled Bucharest by helicopter that morning, were captured by armed insurgents and handed over to the military. On Christmas Day they were put on trial by a self-described “extraordinary military tribunal” and charged with committing genocide, abusing power, undermining the economy, and stealing government funds. For fear that the Securitate would come in with a last-minute rescue, the army did not disclose the site of the trial, and no outside observers were permitted. However, the proceedings were videotaped, and the entire trial was broadcast on Romanian television the following day. The day after that, we in America could see a short clip on our own television screens–an elderly couple huddled in their overcoats and looking bewildered and almost pitiable. Almost. One of Nicolae Ceausescu’s replies to his interrogators reflected his posture. “I am the president of Romania and the commander-in-chief of the Romanian army. I am the president of the people. I will not speak with you provocateurs any more, and I will not speak with the organizers of the putsch.”
As for Elena Ceausescu, she was no innocent bystander. She was a Politburo member and first deputy premier. A few months earlier, when it appeared that ill health might force her husband to step down, she started jockeying for position to succeed him. Now, at the trial, she occasionally piped up with remarks like “Such impudence! I am a member and the chairwoman of the Academy of Sciences. You cannot talk to me in such a way!”
The trial was not a model of due process (although the Ceausescus were offered a defense counsel, whose services they indignantly refused). But there is no doubt that the couple had done the things they were accused of.
They were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then there ensued macabre confusion. Accounts differ. Perhaps the officer in charge of the firing squad was apprehensive that the Securitate forces, still active, would storm in before the executioners could do their job. Perhaps he and the squad members were awestruck at having in their power the dictators who had oppressed them for so long. Whatever. The result was disorder. The soldiers didn’t wait for the formal order to fire, starting to pull their triggers as soon as the Ceausescus stepped outside the building. No one knows how many bullets were fired, but photographs showed the bloody remains.
Warehouses broken open by the insurgents after the execution confirmed the widespread belief that, while most Romanians lived in destitution, Party leaders were copiously supplied with luxuries, including beef, chocolate, coffee, and oranges. As Elena Ceausescu was being led to the firing squad, she cried out, “I was like a mother to you.” Mother ate off gold dishes, the kids starved.
Soon after taking power, Nicolae Ceausescu had outlawed Christmas. Now, against the grisly background of his and Elena’s execution, with the fighting still continuing, Romanians celebrated the Feast of the Nativity for the first time in more than twenty years.
* * *
As East Germany was spinning towards the future, Egon Krenz struggled desperately to keep his balance. The opening of the borders relieved some of the pressure, but the pro-democracy forces still wanted–democracy. On the evening of Monday, November 13, two hundred thousand marched in Leipzig. Reisenfreiheit, freedom to travel, having been achieved, they now demanded free elections, and just plain freedom.
Trying to shore up his position, Krenz had scheduled an extraordinary congress of the Socialist Unity Party for the following May. He now moved the extraordinary congress forward to December. On November 22, the Politburo announced that it was willing to enter into roundtable talks with “other political forces” in the country. On December 1, the Volkskammer (parliament) nullified the clause in the East German constitution that mandated for the Socialist Unity Party the “leading role” in the government. But the protesters were not to be appeased by half measures. A poll showed Krenz as having the support of only 9.6% of the people. Hans Modrow, the new premier, who as Party chief of Dresden had held conciliatory talks with the dissidents, came in with 42%.
The final blow came with the publication of a series of articles in Neues Deutschland. The official Party newspaper had suddenly developed an interest in investigative reporting. The discrepancies the paper disclosed between the lifestyles of the rulers and the ruled in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State were not so large as in Romania, but they stirred great and righteous anger. Apart from descriptions of the luxurious houses in the Wandlitz compound, there were auxiliary revelations. Harry Tisch, head of the Free German Trade Union Federation, kept a huge estate on the Baltic coast with a full complement of servants. Secretary of State for Foreign Trade Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski had been using public money to make private deals in the international arms market. Honecker and his colleagues collectively had billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts.
On December 2, an investigating committee appointed by the Volkskammer brought in its report: the newspaper’s allegations were all too true. At an emergency meeting the next day, the Central Committee expelled 12 of the Party’s leading members, including Honecker, Stoph, Mielke, Tisch, and Schalck-Golodkowski. Upon which the entire Politburo (including Krenz and Modrow) resigned, followed by all 163 members of the Central Committee. But the machinery of government continued to operate. Tisch was arrested and imprisoned. Honecker was placed under house arrest at Wandlitz. Schalck-Golodkowski fled the country but soon gave himself up. He had used the same escape route others had used for 28 years, but he did not need to climb over the wall, en route to West Berlin.
On December 6, Krenz resigned his government posts, and on December 8 the promised Extraordinary Party Congress convened in a sports complex in East Berlin. In a marathon session lasting 17 hours, the delegates chose as their new Party leader the young Gregor Gysi, a lawyer who had represented New Forum clients. Before the balloting began, Gysi told the Congress, “We have to make a radical break with the Stalinist past. We have to change our ways of thinking.”
On December 16, the Congress reconvened to take care of housekeeping details. Two communications were read out loud. Mikhail Gorbachev, in a telegram, expressed his support for the changes in East Germany. Erich Honecker, in a letter, took “full responsibility” for the crisis in his country. He had simply been “out of touch with real life” in East Germany, he said, though he added that he had been misled by others.
The Party decided to change its name. It had been the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Now it would be the Socialist Unity Party of Germany-Party of Democratic Socialism (SED-PDS). By such a measure, Herr Gysi explained with a straight face, both the traditionalists and the reformers would be accommodated. The momentous news was immediately ahead: the delegates were informed that the Stasi would be disbanded. Legitimate intelligence functions would be transferred to a civilian agency.
On December 19, Kohl traveled to Dresden to meet with Modrow, who had retained his post as premier. They came to agreement on some economic questions and on ending remaining travel restrictions between the two Germanies. On one matter, however, as Modrow put it, “the Chancellor has his vision of the future, I have mine.” Kohl’s vision was of a united Germany. He spoke about this to a crowd of more than ten thousand in front of Dresden’s Frauenkirche. The church had been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, but, like the remains of old Coventry Cathedral, the remains of the Frauenkirche had been left standing in the postwar reconstruction. “When the historic moment makes it possible,” Kohl told the crowd, he would work “for the unity of our nation.”
He wished the Dresdeners a merry Christmas, and added, “God bless our German fatherland.”
On New Year’s Eve, Berliners gathered at the border as they had on the night of November 9. This time the festivities were organized, and included a mammoth fireworks show. There were tears and laughter, and they seemed no less genuine than at the spontaneous celebration seven weeks earlier. Whatever the 1990s would bring, the hated and dreaded wall, grim, endless reminder of the reach of totalitarian rule, was effectively gone. What was left of it was now a symbol of regeneration and hope.