Jack Thompson
They Never Used The 'C' Word
I look round the room-the retired journalist's office. A desk. A chair. A sofa. Bookshelves, files and computer. But most of all, the pictures-photographs, posters, prints and maps. In particular, a cartoon of myself as newsreader for BBC World in its very early days. It was sent to me by a viewer in Romania, clearly enjoying the first fruits of freedom and access to relatively objective information and comment after the collapse of Communism and the grisly demise of that ghastly duo, Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu.
Yes, I remember him well, Comrade Ceauşescu. I saw him at Bucharest airport in July 1989 as on a balmy summer's evening he welcomed the leaders of the Soviet Union and its satellites for what was to be the very last Warsaw Pact summit. They were all there-that arch reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, coping patiently with the hardliners-Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Husak of Czechoslovakia, Honecker of East Germany, and Jaruzelski of Poland. Ceauşescu, a silly little man with a Liberace coiffure, who nevertheless inspired fear among his entourage, greeted them all with kisses on both cheeks, except for the wayward men from Hungary, led, if memory serves me well, by Miklós Németh. They were already regarded as beyond the pale, tainted by the adoption of qualified market forces. The Romanian dictator held a similarly hostile view of Gorbachev, who had launched his country on to the flood tide of glasnost and perestroika, concepts that were to spark much painful and bitter debate during this meeting of the officially dubbed Warsaw Treaty Political Consultative Committee.
For this was showcase time for Ceauşescu, his first chance in seven years to host such a summit and the first opportunity he'd had to receive Gorbachev in his own capital. He was worried stiff that something would go wrong because he was in an economic mess and he wanted help from Big Brother. Hitherto he had enthusiastically suppressed and jailed his dissidents, bulldozed ancient churches and whole villages to make way for grandiose projects, the like of which might have made even Albert Speer blush to his roots, and pursued a relatively independent line within the Communist bloc, certainly as far as foreign policy was concerned. He'd done his own deals with the West, to the economic detriment of his people, and played the middleman in attempts to get Israel and the Palestinians to talk to each other. The British had even thought him worth a state visit. He and Elena had stayed the night in Buckingham Palace after a bizarre dinner with the Queen and Philip. As such he had been kept at arm's length by Moscow and its allies who viewed him rather as NATO had considered De Gaulle's France, an ally of sorts but also a troublesome maverick, to be kept in the fold, mistrusted and unloved. But the day of reckoning was at hand. It was of course to come the following December when a surly population revolted. Ceauşescu's minders turned on him and had him and Elena shot in cold blood.
The night before the summit began, I'd been invited to visit the British embassy in Bucharest, an ugly villa down a dark side street off the main drag. A group of young, hardworking and evidently harassed diplomats offered a courteous welcome but insisted we had to descend to the basement, the only certain "unbugged" room in the whole building. It became clear that, if we were to talk of dissidents and name the names of people the embassy staff were trying to help and protect from the predatory conduct of the Securitate, Ceauşescu's vicious secret police, then we must do it in this dismal cellar, reeking of damp and disinfectant. A glass of wine, French rather than the local variety, helped to mitigate the discomfort. At least it brought home to me the hell that was Romania. But times were changing. Ceauşescu knew that his careworn citizens were only too well aware of the relative improvements to life in Hungary, in Poland, even in the Soviet Union itself.
It was a development an oily Romanian government spokesman did his best to explain to me in language George Orwell might have used in 1984 and Animal Farm. I retain a verbatim note of this "apologia pro vita Marxista", this desperate attempt to explain the burgeoning policy differences within the Warsaw Pact.
The essential thing, as the documents of the Warsaw Treaty say, is that all Socialist countries, and party members within those countries, start from the same premise-the need to IMPROVE Socialism. But there are different ways of doing this and it is up to the Soviet Union and the other countries to say what is good for them and what can bring results. At the same time, we have our own opinion about how to achieve this. We can discuss internal developments in one Socialist country while at the same time discussing problems of principle, philosophical and ideological questions, in short, asking ourselves, where is Socialism going?
Not a mention of "Communism". Always "Socialism", as if the renaming of parts had already started, to make it all more palatable to the people of central, eastern and southern Europe and the West. Without wishing to labour this "post hoc" analysis of dogma long dead and buried, I still find it interesting that, only a few days before the 1989 Bucharest summit, Ceauşescu had indeed said each party was free to adapt Socialism to its own conditions but no party could isolate itself from the Socialist community and the "problems" of reform in Hungary for example were not merely an internal affair. If this wasn't the Brezhnev doctrine restated-that distastefully specious argument used to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, under Khruschev, the rape of Hungary in 1956-then, as Gorbachev well recognized at the time, it was at best a crude attempt to disguise it in new clothes.
But as a Soviet journalist told me in Bucharest at the time, Gorbachev had made it absolutely clear that it was no longer possible to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries. He knew full well that intervention in Hungary or Poland would spell disaster for his own attempts to reform Communism at home and improve relations with the West through the medium of nuclear disarmament.
Which was probably why the communiqué that emerged from the Bucharest meeting made copious references to doing away with nuclear weapons and collaboration with NATO. My Romanian spokesman exerted a lot of energy spinning this into Ceauşescu-speak, provoking ribald laughter among both Western and Soviet journalists, who'd already wised up to what was happening to their world. Presumably unused to irony, he ploughed on undaunted if a mite irritated.
A certain satisfaction can be derived from this document. It confirms our position, our call for speedier and wider nuclear disarmament. It condemns attempts by the United States to modernize its tactical nuclear weapons and the concept of the 'deterrent'.
No reference there to Soviet satellites squabbling like ferrets in a sack. Gorbachev breathed a sigh of relief that for the time being he had avoided schism. The cracks had been papered over. Everyone was free to choose their own path to Socialism but not free enough to opt for a different system.
The Russian journalists in Bucharest were embarrassed by this. They were an interesting lot. They wanted to be accepted by us degenerates from the West as real journalists pursuing real stories. They plied us with such booze as they could lay their hands on in a town where there wasn't much booze to be had. They fed us reasonably accurate stories about rows between Ceauşescu and the delegation from Budapest over the treatment of the Hungarians in Transylvania, with Gorbachev acting as referee, and about the East Germans going home early, ostensibly because Erich Honecker had tummy trouble (we now know he was furious with the Soviet leader over the way the whole pack of cards was collapsing). But they'd swallowed the Gorbachev line; that "renovation" was happening in the Soviet empire but these reforms didn't undermine the stability of the Warsaw Pact which Moscow still needed if it was to negotiate a disarmament package with NATO. Yet they certainly went up in our estimation when the hard-line Soviet ambassador in Bucharest wanted to exclude "capitalist" reporters from a Gorbachev news conference. The Russians threatened to boycott it. He backed off under pressure from Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet foreign ministry spokes-man, who had acquired a sort of fan club among Western reporters for making himself so readily available in English. (When I approached him for an interview, he agreed, provided I could point him in the direction of the hotel Duty Free shops.)
It all seems so much old hat now. But it was vital news at the time. For few of us thought the Soviet system would implode so rapidly. We would not have predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or the imminent reunification of Germany. In July 1989, they were frankly unimaginable. In such an atmosphere, where the Communist hacks were doing their best to be nice to us (except for one Romanian who tried to frame me on a charge of petty theft when he lost one of the headsets belonging to the simultaneous interpretation system!), it was easy to accommodate Ceauşescu's plausible spokesman.
Of course I do not deny that you in the West have your values and you should defend them. But let us talk in a respectful way, taking for granted that as long as you fight for the legitimacy of your values, we can do the same for ours. I think if we do talk, if we get to know one another, things can improve.
The siren call of the enemy who wants to make peace. I reminded him that it had not been Britain or any other Western country that had cut off dialogue with Romania; that it had been the Romanians who had isolated themselves internationally; that it was, for example, the Ceauşescu regime which had signed solemn undertakings in Helsinki to respect human rights; and that when we criticized his treatment of dissident writers and villagers who wanted to live in the homes they already possessed, we had been told to mind our own business, and worse.
He shuffled off, only too happy to take the half bottle of Scotch I'd offered him as the price for including him in a BBC World Service report on the Bucharest meeting.
Jack Thompson
is a retired BBC World Service correspondent, now working for Deutsche Welle TV in Berlin. He has worked in South East Asia and Eastern and Central Europe, and interviewed many prominent politicians from King Hussein to Henry Kissinger.
