East Europe 1989: Finally the fear began to fade away
Power feared the people, and the people feared the future
By Jukka Luoma
There was still a feeling of fear in Eastern Europe shortly before the “people’s democracies” crumbled in 1989.
The governments were afraid of change, and of their peoples. The peoples were afraid of their leaders and their helpers, as well as the future.
In the west, people were accustomed to the fact that in part of Europe, there was a reluctance to speak with foreign journalists.
A foreigner had no serious cause for fear. I was also able to collect pictures of those in power and of how people subjected that power would live.
Traces of fear were clear to see in Czechoslovakia. The country had been “normalised” in 1968 after reforms there were crushed. Many career officials were opportunists.
The museum of Interior Ministry forces and the Border Guard in Prague reflected the government’s opinion about society.
A museum that had been set up in an old monastery was not one of the destinations that tourists were guided to. On display were publications of the dissident Charter 77 movement, along with drug syringes.
Therefore, in the autumn of 1988 it was not surprising that two men would keep watch from a car parked on a Prague street when I went to meet Vaclav Maly, who had been stripped of his post as a Catholic priest at the insistence of the government.
Maly had a job as a cleaner of the Prague underground rail system. “More and more are nevertheless slowly stepping over the fear threshold”, said Maly hopefully. He had most recently been arrested a couple of days earlier. He hoped that I would leave him my card so that it might be found the next time that his home was searched.
It came as no surprise in Prague that someone would walk close behind me when I went to interview the persecuted author Vaclav Havel in the autumn of 1986. The unknown companion followed me all the way up to the upper landing in the staircase.
Havel had stubborn eyes. He said that Czechoslovakia was totalitarian, but believed that the stubbornness of the opposition could also change those who had power.
Havel and Maly had brought themselves to a position in which the officials turned them into examples to warn others. The secret police operated openly, and sent their heavy-set provocateurs to peaceful demonstrations.
Czechoslovakia was the only country of the East Bloc were officials still demanded that Finnish journalists write in a manner compatible with Finland’s policy of neutrality. “Not even Helsingin Sanomat lives in a vacuum” I remember one official instructing me.
Representatives of East Germany did not have the guilt that may have weighed on those in Czechoslovakia. The East German party and government were proud that socialism worked in their country.
Ordinary East Germans were reticent. Only in the late autumn of 1989 did pride start showing in their eyes.
The GDR party was afraid of what Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev had started. The consequences of his reforms were open. Gorbachev had new demands for efficiency for Eastern Europe, but chaos and cynicism were on the rise.
Harry Nick, a member of the East German Politburo had written in 1982 that “communism without economic growth would not be another form of communism; it would not be communism at all”. The recession in the late 1980s was especially serious, because the East Germans knew how West Germany lived.
East Germany’s leader Erich Honecker feared in 1989, with good reason, that if the party were to retreat before the people, there would be no end to the deterioration of prestige. He seems to have known that a retreat would come when Moscow loses its will to rule over an empire.
The Hungarian leadership relied on its lightweight model. In the relatively tolerant Budapest, people were accustomed to Hungary having a good reputation.
The Budapest market hall was bulging with plenty to a degree that could not even be dreamed of in Moscow. However, on the outside there were old people looking for food in rubbish bins. The boundaries of reform communism had been reached.
Experience taught the Hungarians that freedom needs to be enjoyed cautiously.
At the abandoned lot 301 at the rear of the Rakoskerestztur cemetery in Budapest there were still nameless mounds where the bodies of Prime Minister Imre Nagy and the other leaders who were shot after the 1956 uprising, as well as those of hundreds of other participants who were killed, lay buried.
In the autumn of 1988 some had dared adorn the graves with Hungarian flags and coloured ribbons. Janos Kadar, who had taken power after the uprising, had already been pushed aside. Freedom extended to the mounds at the cemetery, but no further.
Things were much worse in Oradea, in Romania. Men in a car asked photographer Vesa Oja and myself if we would help them flee to Hungary. Then the men laughed and drove away.
The people of Oradea would make a round of stores, which sold food in rusty tins. They acted as if Oja and his camera were not there. The ghostly feeling was intensified by the sudden ringing of the bells of the old church, even though the fresh snow around the church was untouched.
AT the border we were arrested. Our films were taken away, Oja’s Swiss Army knife was stolen, and my empty notebook was examined. “Come back to Romania, but come as friends”, said an official politely - llike an officer and a gentleman.
“We had Lenin, the Party, and the will to win, but it doesn’t seem to be enough for the Poles”, is what I heard Soviet official Georgi Iizhikin say menacingly near the Polish border in December 1981, a couple of days after the State of War had been declared in Poland.
The army stopped the rise of the Solidarity moment at that time, and Poland continued to decline. Everything seemed to be on sale in exchange for Western currency. The average daily wage was the equivalent of one US dollar.
However, compared with Moscow, Warsaw was psychologically free. The party had learned to fear its people. “A state that was not independent faced an independent society”, is how Solidarity activist Adam Michnik said it.
Warsaw had the best jokes. What are the four phases in the development of socialism? Utopian, scientific, real, and state of war.
The conflict between ideology and reality was amusing. Utopian socialism dreamed of equality, but forgot the conditions of ownership, which scientific socialism underscored. Real socialism, meanwhile, looked askance at daydreaming.
Not everybody was laughing. Young Polish journalists who visited Finland gave lopsided smiles when I told them how easy it was to meet opposition leaders in Warsaw.
Tanks and police appeared to be realities still in the late 1980s, which could not be shaken by the anger of the subjects, or the outrage of the world.
How could societies and nations become free without breaking the division of Europe, which was the precondition of the great power status of the Soviet Union? Discipline and prestige had often been restored by resorting to bloodshed.
Eastern Europe did not even have the right to become Finlandized. The area was much more tightly lodged between the Soviet Union and Germany than Finland was. The Soviet Union had taken Eastern Europe in the war, but not Finland.
The architect of the East Bloc, Josif Stalin may have made a mistake when he included such a diverse array of countries in the socialist camp. Russia was burdened by the traditions of the tsarist times, discipline was typical of East Germany, Defiance was Polish, Hungary had the legacy of being a former great power, and Czechoslovakia was dominated by the feeling of betrayal. In Bulgaria there were problems with the ethnically Turkish minority.
The casting defect in the bloc was the lack of freedom and its moral bankruptcy. The powerful who oppressed the people had been brought in by the occupier. The alien nature of the power made sure that the governments of Eastern Europe were dependent on the threat of violence.
Political scientists have pondered whether or not the word “totalitarian” defined how Eastern Europe differed from Latin American dictatorships, for instance. The quibbling seemed silly. The East Bloc sought to have a total grip on its peoples.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.11.2009
JUKKA LUOMA / Helsingin Sanomat
jukka.luoma@hs.fi
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 East Europe 1989: Finally the fear began to fade away |
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