András Schweitzer
Gorbachev's Go-Ahead
András Schweitzer in Conversation with Mark Kramer
Nothing was inevitable. If the Soviet Union had wanted, it could have
easily stopped the process that led to the dissolution of the
Communist bloc in 1989—says Professor Mark Kramer, Director of the
Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University. As he sees it, the
changes were ultimately caused by three factors, neither sufficient in
itself: the fundamental change in Soviet policy reflected in Mikhail
Gorbachev’s commitment to promote far-reaching reform and avoid the
use of violence in Eastern Europe, the willingness of millions of ordinary
people to go out onto the streets to demand freedom, and the rapid
demoralization of hardline East European leaders as they realized that
the Soviet Union would not come to their aid against internal rebellion.
András Schweitzer: Western leaders were more than reluctant to support the
historic events of 1989. Apparently, they did not want to leave behind the bipolar world
order, which they found stable and predictable—this is what a Hungarian historian,
László Borhi, claimed at a recent conference. Do you agree with his statements?
Mark Kramer: I don’t fully agree with László, although I agree with him up to a
point. It is not really accurate to say that Western governments wanted to keep the
status quo indefinitely. I would distinguish the short term from the longer term.
Even though large bureaucracies normally prefer to stick with the procedures and
situations they are familiar with, that was not the main constraint on Western
policy in 1989. Western leaders never accepted the permanent existence of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, they very much welcomed the
changes that were going on in the late 1980s, but they also wanted to ensure that
the process of change would be orderly and would not veer out of control, perhaps
leading to chaotic violence. It’s easy nowadays, with the benefit of hindsight, to
argue that Western governments were too timid and too modest in their goals. But
many people at the time were worried about the limits of Moscow’s tolerance and
the prospect of a violent crackdown if events proceeded too fast and too far. These
concerns were perfectly understandable, even if ultimately unfounded. There was
a lot of uncertainty at the time—it is reflected not only in public comments in the
West, but also if you look at the declassified transcripts of conversations that various
officials in Poland and Hungary were having among themselves. Given the record
of 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1981, no one until 1989 could be fully certain that the Soviet
Union would not put pressure to move things back. Some concern still existed in
Hungary as late as July 1989, even after the reburial of Imre Nagy in mid-June.
What were your expectations back then?
By early 1989, after Imre Pozsgay’s characterization of the Hungarian Revolution
as a “popular uprising against a dictatorship that was humiliating the nation” failed
to elicit any reprisal from Moscow, and especially after the June elections in Poland
I regarded the Brezhnev Doctrine as dead. And I am not saying this just in
retrospect. I wrote an article that appeared in the American journal International
Security in the late summer of 1989. I had written it back in April. Its title was
“Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine” because basically the argument was that
Gorbachev had done away with the Brezhnev Doctrine. I remember I laid out a few
scenarios, one of them was that the whole bloc would collapse: communism
would come to an end and the Warsaw Pact would dissolve. But I did not yet regard
that as likely. Another scenario was along the lines of what Gorbachev was seeking,
the continued existence of the Warsaw Pact with reformist governments. But the
problem with that was that there were still four governments out of the six that
weren’t moving in a reformist direction at all. Another scenario that I laid out was
that the Soviet military would seek to move against Gorbachev. The fourth scenario
was that Gorbachev would decide that his policies had gone too far and would
send military forces into Eastern Europe. I regarded that as very unlikely. When
that article came out, I was criticised by many readers as being too na?ve or too
bold. They expected Gorbachev to clamp down. Within a few months it turned out
that I was not bold enough.
At the conference you claimed that even a year before those events, there was no
one who would have forecast them, because they were far from being inevitable. So
how did you view the situation somewhat earlier, say in the symbolic year of 1984?
Back then, as a first-year graduate student, I thought it was inconceivable that
communism would disintegrate in Eastern Europe. I was in Hungary at that time
and even though Hungary was not as unpleasant as, say, Czechoslovakia or Romania
or East Germany, all of which I visited in that same trip, it was still a Communist
country that I found quite oppressive to be in. It wasn’t anything like Romania
though. In Romania I was followed even though I was just a young graduate
student, only 21 years old. And they obviously wanted me to know I was being
followed. In the case of East Germany, I later found out from my Stasi file that the
desk clerk there was reporting on when I left and when I came back to the hotel
and what I said. By the way, although the desk clerk reported quite accurately, the
file wasn’t all that interesting, but what he did report was true. I remember I had
made one comment on the phone at a certain point, I said something like: I don’t
know how anyone can live in this stupid police state. And he reported it word for
word quite accurately. But to answer your question, I know no one who in the mid-
1980s was predicting that by 1989 communism would disintegrate. No one.
[...]
András Schweitzer
is an editor of the weekly HVG where a shorter version of this interview appeared in
Hungarian on 14 November 2009.
