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Everything was now on the line, Great Britain’s dignity and Margaret Thatcher’s role as Prime Minister. She decides to send a task force to secure the Falkland Islands, but they were so far away that it would take weeks for them to get there. In the interim, President Reagan sent his Secretary of State, Al Haig, to Number 10 Downing Street, in the hopes of mediating a diplomatic solution of some sort.
The American suggestion was a compromise. The Argentine forces withdraw, the British have some administration, and then there would be some soon-to-be-determined international authority. Compromise was not a word that Margaret Thatcher was particularly fond of. As she put it, “Interim authority to do what? I beg you to remember that in 1938, Neville Chamberlain sat at this same table, discussing an arrangement which sounds very much like the one you’re asking me to accept. Were I to do so, I would be censured in the House of Commons, and properly so. Britain simply will not reward aggression. That is the lesson of 1938.”
A war zone was declared around the Falklands. Despite the enormous difficulties in fighting so far away from the British mainland, British troops made strong headway, swiftly recapturing one of the islands with no British casualties. Soon thereafter, Thatcher’s forces sank the Argentine ship, General Belgrano, killing 300 Argentine troops in the process and causing a bit of controversy for Thatcher because the ship was outside the maritime exclusion zone. But as the foreign office put it, “If it hadn’t wanted to be sunk, it shouldn’t have been there.”
President Reagan himself tried to call on May 31st to try to de-escalate the situation, and again, she wasn’t having it. “I didn’t lose some of my finest ships and some of my finest lives to leave quietly under a ceasefire. How would the President feel, supposing Alaska was invaded?” Two weeks later, the Argentinian forces surrendered and British control over the Falklands was restored. This led the way to Thatcher having an enormous landslide the following year. The Tories gained 58 more seats, dropping Labour down to 209, their worst result since 1935. Thatcher was no longer a joke or a transitional figure, but an established government leader in her own right.
It was only a few months after Thatcher’s landslide that Reagan stabbed her in the back and stabbed her hard. There’s a small island called Grenada off the coast of Venezuela with a population of about 90,000 people. Despite having a communist coup in 1979, Grenada nevertheless remained a member of the British Commonwealth with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. In late 1983, American naval vessels were spotted near Grenada. On October 24, 1983, Thatcher’s right-hand man, Geoffrey Howe, stood in the House of Commons and insisted that there was no reason to think there would be any American intervention in Grenada. He said, and he believed, that the Reagan and Thatcher administrations were in close contact and that she would be given fair warning if the matters were to turn militarily.
What Howe didn’t know was that, two days earlier, President Reagan had already approved an invasion of Grenada by American forces, and he chose to keep that matter from Thatcher. As he later admitted, “I didn’t want her to say no.” She was completely humiliated by the United States, subsequently invaded to liberate the island nation. She had constantly talked about the special relationship between the US and the UK. Now it was obvious to her that America and Great Britain often had different ideas in mind for maintaining their power. Not long after that, he called her to apologize.
But the difference between the parliamentary system and American system is that the Prime Minister has to go in front of the House of Commons and answer questions directly from the opposition. Now Thatcher had to face her opponents and tap dance around the fact that President Reagan had so publicly humiliated her. A couple of months later, about a week before Christmas, 1983, the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, planted a car bomb outside London’s world-famous Harrod’s department store. The area failed to get evacuated, even though the IRA had called in the threat. Six people were killed, dozens more injured, as the bomb damaged five floors of the store.
Thatcher’s husband, the first gentleman of the UK, Dennis Thatcher, nevertheless went there for presents. And as he put it, “It wasn’t as crowded as it normally is, but no damned Irishman is going to stop me going there.” The following year, Dennis almost had to eat his words. In mid-October 1984, he was staying with Margaret and other Tory leaders at Brighton’s Grand Hotel for a Conservative party conference. At 3 AM in the morning of October 12th, a few minutes after Thatcher finished editing the speech she was going to give, she heard a loud thud, followed by a different sound. She knew it was a bomb immediately. And later learned that that second sound was that of a falling chimney making its way through several floors.
Five people were killed, a few dozen injured, some very seriously, but none were the main targets of the bombing, which was Margaret Thatcher. The next day, the IRA released a statement taking credit for the bombing, telling Thatcher, “Today, we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You’ll have to be lucky always.” But the conference went on as planned. Nine days later, President Reagan took part in his second and final debate against a Democratic nominee for President, Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. The first debate had gone poorly for Reagan, and there was talk that he was too old to be reelected, a question which was asked of him directly.
“You already are the oldest President in history, and some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban Missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?” “Not at all, Mr. Truitt, and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” [laughter]
The consummate actor, Reagan, paused, took a glass of water and let the joke ride. Mondale was laughing. The moderator was laughing. The audience was laughing. And Mondale later said, “You’ll see that I was smiling, but I think if you come in close, you’ll see some tears coming down because I knew he had gotten me there.” Reagan went on to win every single state, with the exception of Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, which Mondale only carried by less than 4,000 votes out of 2 million. The popular vote was 59% to Reagan, 41% for Mondale. It was almost a perfect inversion of LBJ’s victory over Goldwater 20 years prior.
Now, Reagan had been trying desperately to meet with the Soviet leaders in 1982. He had reiterated an invitation to Brezhnev to suggest a summit instead of a meeting, maybe in Finland or Switzerland. But that would never come to pass because Brezhnev died on November 10th, 1982. Reagan could meet with Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, or his successor, Chernenko, because as Reagan pointed out, “they kept dying on me.” And you can see perhaps why the Soviet leaders wouldn’t want to meet with Reagan, because at this time, his views of the Soviet Union very publicly took on a strident tone.
As he put it, he referred to Russia as “an evil empire” and said that “they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” This was not exactly the language of diplomacy, especially with two nations with such enormous nuclear arsenals. What Reagan began to do was exactly what the Russian people had been doing for decades, using jokes to undermine Russian authority and speak truths which would otherwise be forbidden.
The commissar went out to the farm, their state farm, and stopped one of the workers and asked him how things were, any complaints. And he said, ‘Oh, no, sir. Never heard anyone complain.’ He said, ‘How are the crops?’ ‘The crops are wonderful.’ ‘What about the potato harvest?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the potatoes.’ He said, ‘Comrade, if we piled the potatoes up in one pile, they would reach the foot of God.’ And the commissar said, ‘This is the Soviet Union. There is no God.’ He said, ‘That’s all right. There are no potatoes.’
But what the President of the United States was saying is that the Soviet Union is a godless, dishonest country that cannot afford to feed her own people. When Andropov died, Thatcher thought it would be a good idea to go to Moscow to attend the funeral to make some connections. She said it would give her a good opportunity to meet the man who would emerge as the new Soviet leader, Chernenko. While she was there, she invited several of the USSR leaders to meet her in Great Britain. One of these men was a young reformer by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev.
On the morning of December 16th, 1984, Gorbachev drove down to Chequers, which is the country estate set aside for the Prime Minister’s use, to meet Thatcher for lunch. He barely picked up his fork before she went full Thatcher on him. She lectured him about how central planning doesn’t work and how markets do. She lectured him about the Soviets funding the British unions in the midst of another national strike. She lectured him about the USSR refusing to let Jewish citizens emigrate to escape anti-Semitism, even though others were allowed to leave the country if that was their desire. Then she lectured him for not having touched his food.
Gorbachev paused and replied with the Russian equivalent of dry British wit. He said, “I know you’re a person of staunch beliefs, someone who adheres to certain principles and values. This commands respect. But please consider that next to you is a person of your own ilk. I can assure you that I am not under instructions from the politburo to persuade you to join the Communist Party.” She burst into a hearty laugh, put aside her notes, and the two had a sincere heart-to-heart. As she very famously told the BBC shortly thereafter, “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
But of course, Gorbachev was a politician, and he had his own agenda. A week later, Thatcher visited Reagan at Camp David, the President’s retreat, and she made a point to tell him what she thought Gorbachev was up to, and she made a point to proclaim to him how loyal she was to that special relationship between the United States and Great Britain. But there was one big issue that Gorbachev wanted Thatcher to speak to Reagan about, a message that she was happy to pass on. As he said, “Tell your friend President Reagan not to go ahead with space weapons.” In other words, Gorbachev wanted Thatcher’s help to stop star wars.
Mikhail Gorbachev was born in Russia in 1931 at the height of the famine. Within a couple of years, three of his father’s siblings would succumb to the famine, which killed somewhere between a third to a half of his village. The following year, his paternal grandfather was arrested for not having met the government’s sowing plan, even though he hadn’t been given any seeds to sow. His maternal grandfather was also caught in the Great Terror, was arrested in 1937 for supposedly being part of a Trotskyite organization. And instantly, the young Mikhail Gorbachev became a pariah. As he put it, “Even the neighbor’s kids refused to have anything to do with me.” He had witnessed firsthand what Stalinism meant in practice. The issue with terror and totalitarianism is, when you kill and torture people, they often have children. And when the children grow up, they’re rarely happy about it.
When his grandfather was eventually released, he learned what had been done to him. Trying to get him to confess, as Gorbachev wrote, “the investigator blinded him with a lamp, beat him unmercifully, broke his arms by squeezing the door. And when these standard tortures proved futile, they invented a new one. They put a wet sheepskin coat on him and sat him on a hot stove.” Despite all this, Gorbachev grew up as a believer in the Soviet system, and he rose through diligence and hard work swiftly through the ranks of the Communist Party.
Due to this work, he was one of the few Russian citizens allowed to go abroad. When Gorbachev visited Prague in 1969, he first understood how the Soviet Union was seen by other citizens in other communist countries. Specifically, when he visited a factory the year after the Prague Spring, the workers literally turned their backs on him in a blatant show of contempt. The USSR’s power was not viewed, like the Soviet newspapers claimed, as fraternal help. Seven weeks after Reagan was inaugurated for his second term, Gorbachev was appointed as the new General Secretary, the first Soviet leader to be born after the Russian Revolution. He was only 54 years old.
As he saw it, one of the primary obstacles preventing peace between the US and the USSR was Reagan’s strategic defense initiative. Both Reagan and Gorbachev viewed a nuclear exchange between the two as effectively bringing about the end of the world. You can no more win a nuclear war than you can win an earthquake. What was fascinating is both men secretly committed to not retaliating, should a nuclear war be launched, though neither knew that was the other’s position.
Before he had assumed office as President, Reagan took part in discussion about what would happen if the Soviet Union struck first. One participant in the meeting argued that, should the missiles be fired, the US should launch a response before we were hit. Reagan said, “That would be the wrong thing to do.” His advisors left the meeting almost certain that he would not retaliate in the event of an attack. Gorbachev was even more explicit. After he took over the USSR, he was walked through a simulated nuclear strike so he would know what to do, should the worst ever happen. As he sat there being told that missiles were flying toward the Soviet Union, he refused to retaliate. As he put it, “I will not press the button even for training purposes.” The two hawks were secretly hardcore doves.
That led to a possibility. Could the threat of nuclear war be removed forever? Thatcher did not agree. In her perspective, nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented. This was the thinking behind the strategic defense initiative, SDI, or as it was properly called Star Wars. Basically, the idea was, you would have these satellites, and the satellites would fire defensive missiles, and if a missile was fired at one country or the other, that missile would be destroyed. Thatcher herself thought this was crazy. As she put it, “Even if an SDI system proved 95% successful, which is a significant success rate, over 60 million people would still die from the missiles that got through.”
Reagan privately told himself that he would offer the SDI technology with the Soviets, and this would convince them that this would not leave the US as a unilateral military power, one that could strike down the Russians’ missile weapons as well as fire their own. Correspondence between the two ensued, and there was a meeting set up for the two men in November 1985 in Geneva. This was the big moment, the leader of the United States meeting the reformist leader of the Soviet Union. So Reagan walked up to Gorbachev and had his icebreaker. And he told him that he was certain that if the United States and the Soviet Union were threatened by an invasion from outer space, the two men would cooperate.
As journalist Lou Canon put it, “Gorbachev, who did not have at his fingertips the Marxist position on the propriety of cooperating with the imperialist against interplanetary invasion, changed the subject.” Reagan thought this meant he scored a point and he repeated what he said to Gorbachev to a group of high school students when he returned to the United States. He also repeated it to his advisors to mixed reactions. After that, Colin Powell, who was then Deputy National Security Advisor, struggled to keep interplanetary references out of Reagan’s speeches. When the subject came up, Powell rolled his eyes and said, “Here comes the little green men again,” that the big story of Geneva is that the two had hit it off as human beings.
In fact, the two were of such similar minds that Reagan eventually asked his team, “Why wait until the end of the century for a world without nuclear weapons? Maybe we could both destroy our arsenals in the near future.” Thatcher did not think this made sense. As she put it, “It was one of the few times when I think his aspirations left the reality of human nature.” She said, “It was inconceivable that the Soviets would turn over their last nuclear weapon. They would cheat. I would cheat.” The two men agreed to a one-on-one meeting to prepare the ground for a later, larger Washington summit. Gorbachev proposed either Iceland or Thatcher’s home turf of London as two possible locations. Reagan chose Iceland. With two weeks’ notice, Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, was given notice that they would be hosting an event of historic proportions.
The other issue is, it was a lot easier for America with her market-based system to generate the funds to continue an arms race. Gorbachev, with the backwards planned command economy of the Soviets, simply did not have the funds to meet American military might. And Reagan made a joke of this himself.
I’ve been collecting stories that are told in the Soviet Union by their people among themselves, which reveal they’ve got a great sense of humor, but they’ve also got a pretty cynical attitude toward their system. And I told this one, Bill, you’ll have to hear it again. I told it in the car. I didn’t tell this one to Gorbachev. You know, there’s a 10-year delay in the Soviet Union of delivery of an automobile, and only one out of seven families in the Soviet Union own automobiles. There’s a 10-year wait. And you go through quite a process when you’re ready to buy, and then you put up the money in advance. And this happened to a fellow, and this is their story that they tell, this joke, that this man, he laid down his money, and then the fellow that was in charge said to him, “OK, come back in 10 years and get your car.” And he said, “Morning or afternoon?” And the fellow behind the counter said, “Well, 10 years from now, what difference does it make?” And he said, “Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.”
But this joke about Soviet inefficiency certainly had a ring of truth to it. So American experts had been arguing whether the Soviet Union had been spending somewhere between 9 to 11% of their gross domestic product on the military, or was it more like 11 to 13%? The actual number was somewhere between 30% to 40%, and to provide perspective, during World War II, the highest the US spent of GDP on the military was 35%. The Soviets are spending that much every single year, which is an unsustainable cost. As Gorbachev explicitly told Reagan, “The US has money and can do things that the Soviets cannot do.” This whole vision that Lenin had of efficiency through a planned economy did not come to fruition. Seventy years later, after the revolution, there were still no omelets.
As the two men met, Reagan had a very straightforward proposal. First step of the plan, each scraps 50% of their missiles. Then when SDI reaches a point where it could be tested, the US would permit Soviet observers to observe the tests. When the test showed that the system was effective, they would each destroy the balance of their missiles, and each country would share the SDI technology. At 10 years, when all ballistic missiles were eliminated, they would each deploy Star Wars simultaneously. As Reagan’s deputy director of the CIA put it, there appeared to be only two people on the planet who thought SDI would actually work, Reagan and Gorbachev. But this remained a sticking point during Iceland.
Gorbachev found it absolutely incredible that Reagan would share this technology with his lifelong enemies, the Soviets. In fact, as Reagan’s director of US arms control and disarmament, Ken Adelman, admitted, there was no way Reagan ever would. Reagan kept insisting on the use of Star Wars as a metaphor, saying that “when the use of chemical weapons was prohibited after World War I, the world did not reject gas masks. They were the guarantee of our protection against such a weapon in case someone decide to use it.” Over and over, Gorbachev brought up why Star Wars was unacceptable, and Reagan being Reagan, over and over, Reagan brought up his gas mask metaphor. “That’s the 10th time you talked about gas masks,” Gorbachev eventually snapped, only exaggerating a little bit.
Gorbachev began to give Reagan everything he wanted. He agreed with Reagan about reducing and possibly eliminating not only nuclear missiles, but nuclear weapons entirely. He agreed about the need for transparency and mutual verification. When Reagan pointed out he couldn’t withdraw nukes from Europe and leave them vulnerable to Soviet invasion, Gorbachev volunteered to massively reduce conventional forces as well. As Reagan put it, “I couldn’t believe what was happening. We were getting amazing agreements. I thought we were in complete agreement and we were going to achieve something remarkable.”
Gorbachev sat there and gave Reagan everything he wanted. But Gorbachev, of course, was still a Russian. He leaned forward, smiled at the President, and said, “This all depends, of course, on you giving up SDI.” Reagan Reykjavik has now become shorthand in conservative circles for holding fast to one’s principles when everything is on the line politically. All Reagan had to do was give up his silly Star Wars program, which at best was many years from being technologically feasible. He just had to compromise. Reagan refused. He walked.
Thatcher, for her part, was delighted. “My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet.” The whole system of nuclear deterrence, which had kept the peace in Europe for 40 years, was close to being abandoned. She even began to say behind closed doors that the Americans were crazy.
Gorbachev was unlike many of his predecessors because throughout his career, he had spent a fair amount of time in the West. In 1983, he spent a week in Canada as part of the Central Committee’s Secretariat for Agriculture, studying farming techniques because the Canadian climate was similar to the Soviet one, something that certainly holds true to this day, if you’d catch me. He spent time in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and West Germany in the early 1970s as a member of Soviet delegations, and he saw that liberalization was key for the well-being of the citizens of the USSR.
In early 1986, Gorbachev gave a speech announcing his policy of “perestroika”, rebuilding, and “glasnost”, which meant openness. He saw that honest conversations with Reagan and Thatcher, where all parties agreed, made plain their concerns and goals, allowed for, at the very least, mutual trust and respect. This liberalization of information was met with no small amount of hostility from entrenched bureaucrats and Communist Party officials. As Gorbachev realized, the removal of the curtain of secrecy was tantamount to a death sentence for some organizations because their uselessness would be exposed. Not just the emperor, but the entire court would be found to have no clothes. But once the floodgates were open, little could stop them.
Revelations about Soviet labor camps, Stalin’s collusion with Hitler, these became topics of public discourse. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was eventually serialized and published. Even Lolita was cleared for publication by a Russian court. As historian Michael Dobbs pointed out, “The rewriting of Soviet history became so extensive that Soviet secondary schools were obliged to cancel their history exams pending the release of new textbooks.” Western shows began to appear on Soviet television, and people could see for themselves how others lived in the West, and they were not, as had been claimed for decades, destitute and hungry.
A few months after Reykjavik, Gorbachev invited Thatcher to visit Moscow in March of 1987. On February 27, 1987, she had a seminar with the UK’s greatest experts on the Soviet Union to prepare herself. They informed her that there was no sign of adoption of market principles in the Soviet economy, and there was no likelihood the Soviet ideology would change fundamentally. The foreign office, which she had hated all her life, gave her two silver-handed hair brushes as her official gift to Gorbachev, even though he was completely bald. Thatcher and Gorbachev got along very well when she got to Moscow, arguing for hours, but in an atmosphere of mutual admiration rather than mutual distrust.
When Thatcher first stepped foot into the Prime Minister’s office in 1979, she recited the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” And now, in 1987, it was to the Russian people that Margaret Thatcher was bringing hope. This Methodist, this daughter of a green grocer from suburban Grantham, who was the epitome of the hated bourgeoisie that Lenin so despised, was now walking the streets of the Soviet Union, being treated by the Russian media better than she was treated by the Western media. She was not presented as an enemy, but rather as a cousin or a friend.
In a move without precedent, Thatcher was interviewed for an hour on Soviet television by three Russian journalists, and it was aired, unedited, that same evening. Over 120 million people ended up watching the Iron Lady, although, in all fairness, it’s not like there was much else on. They saw Thatcher ask the interviewers explicitly, “What do you think are the advantages of a socialist society?” And they didn’t answer. They simply changed the subject.
The Russian people were very familiar with the image of a strong, forthright woman who runs circles around the men around her. When she insisted that “we both want above all peace,” and pointed out that it was the Soviet Union that had deployed ICBMs in Western Europe, and that the USSR had a very good anti-ballistic missile defense system around Moscow, they knew that she was telling the truth and that it was their media that had been withholding it from them.
A few months after Thatcher’s visit, Reagan planned a trip to West Berlin to deliver a speech for the city’s 750th anniversary. There was one line that was a huge problem among his staff, but Reagan insisted on delivering it.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Though this won Reagan accolades in the West, this really put Gorbachev in a difficult position because if he could be seen as bending the knee to the West, this did not suit his purposes at all. He had to go slowly and carefully against the bureaucracy that had been in place for decades. The following year was Reagan’s turn to walk Red Square with Gorbachev. At one point, Gorbachev took a young boy from his mother’s arms and gave him to Reagan and said, “Shake hands with grandpa.” When Gorbachev had been that boy’s age, contact with a foreigner would have been a one-way ticket to the Gulag. Now it was something to celebrate.
A smart reporter asked Reagan if he still regarded the USSR as an evil empire, and the American president said, “No, I was talking about another time, another era.” One month later, Gorbachev gave a major speech and pointed out that the imposition of a social system from outside, by any means, let alone military, are dangerous trappings of the past period, and that power politics in all their forms and manifestations are historically obsolete. No one, not even Gorbachev himself, realized that, in uttering those words, he had committed himself to freeing half the world. The rest was just application.
It had started with Poland. On October 16, 1978, the man who chose the regnal name of Pope John Paul II, became the first non-Italian Pope since the 1500s. And not only a non-Italian Pope, but someone from the far side of the Iron Curtain. One of John Paul’s predecessors, Pope Paul VI, had wanted to visit Poland in 1966 to commemorate the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity coming to Poland, but they had refused him. And Brezhnev tried to send Pope John Paul II a similar message, saying, “We know that he’s a wise man. Tell him that he’s sick and that it’s better for him not to come to Poland.” He was a wise man and he was in perfectly good health, and he came to Poland anyway.
Pope John Paul II delivered a series of several outdoor masses. Over 10 million Poles came out over the course of his trip to join him in prayer. On June 2, 1979, he stood in Victory Square, which is the largest city square in Warsaw, in front of a crowd of almost 300,000 people. He prayed for his home country and her people, concluding with a desperate plea, “I cry out from the depths of this millennium. Let your spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.” The faithful had been told for years that they were alone, but now they saw they had the numbers, not those who preached the doctrine of communism.
The following July saw a series of labor strikes around Poland. Workers protested a hike in prices without an increase in wages. The media did everything it could to suppress news of what was happening, but this was 1980, not 1940. It’s far more difficult to suppress the flow of information and far easier to create underground newspapers and radio broadcasts. An agreement in August 1980 reaffirmed the people’s constitutional rights in Poland to freedom of speech and of the press. And importantly, it allowed for the establishment of a trade union not under control of the Communist Party and it guaranteed workers the right to strike. Inspired by the Pope, the newfound organization called itself Solidarity. By December of 1981, Solidarity was so popular that they had the ability to threaten a crippling general strike as the Polish authorities continued to crack down on dissent.
And the Polish authorities called their bluff. They didn’t have a choice. Moscow told them in no uncertain terms that if they don’t crack down, they would send in the tanks. And this was something that Moscow had done in the lifetime of virtually everyone, if not everyone, in the Polish leadership. On December 13th, 1981, the Polish government declared martial law, and they abandoned even the pretense of a country where law had any meaning.
Hundreds of telecommunication exchanges were raided. Telephone lines were cut in order to prevent what they called misinformation from spreading. A curfew was imposed. Huge swaths of industry were placed under military control. Airports shut down, borders sealed, and travel to and from major cities was heavily controlled. When coal miners went on strike, the government fired at them, killing eight men. Other protests were met with similarly deadly consequences, but the persecution worked. The protests died down, and eventually, a year later, martial law was repealed. The leaders of Solidarity were given relatively short prison sentences, but the organization was now banned. What had been a nationwide labor movement now became a heavily weakened underground resistance force.
Thatcher visited Poland in November 1988 with the same general who had imposed martial law seven years prior. But now he had toned down his authoritarianism and let her know that he wanted to open dialogue with Solidarity. She was delighted to be able to act as an intermediary. She met with Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, and she urged him to meet with Jaruzelski, the general, and to exchange views to make sure that the authorities heard what he had been telling her. Lech Walesa just pointed to the ceiling. He goes, “No problem. Our meetings are bugged anyway.”
The following month, Gorbachev delivered a major speech at the UN and promised that within two years, the Soviet military would be reduced by half a million personnel. Rather than sending in the tanks, as his predecessors had threatened and done, he would be removing them from East Germany, from Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, in addition to withdrawing tens of thousands of Soviet troops from these other countries. Polish government officials were thus free to negotiate with Solidarity without the threat of a Soviet gun to their heads.
Jaruzelski insisted that they didn’t have a choice but to start these talks. This was a controversy within the leading party of Poland. The Prime Minister agreed with Jaruzelski, saying, “We are not dreaming about giving up power. We’re talking here about arranging to retain power.” Jaruzelski threatened to resign if he didn’t get his way. The Prime Minister, the Interior Minister, and the Defense Minister, they all joined the first secretary in his threat. The government was already losing its sense of legitimacy with the population, and this, they saw, would be a way to regain it.
They announced that they would be engaged in official talks with Solidarity. For two months, the government met with Solidarity leaders and discussed every issue. There were 92 total sessions of what became known as the roundtable talks, because the talks were held around circular tables to be sure that no one could be seen as sitting at the head. Solidarity was given access to the airwaves, so they could directly explain to the Polish people what was being negotiated that day.
In March of 1989, another nation followed Poland’s lead. Miklos Nemeth, who was Hungarian Prime Minister, paid a visit to Gorbachev in Moscow to let him know he had made a decision and effectively to ask for permission. 300 kilometers of barbed wire and electrified fencing separated Hungary from democratic Austria. He wanted to tear it all down. He told Gorbachev it had outlived its usefulness. Hungary was not isolated from the outside world, and Hungarians had been permitted to travel abroad. In fact, the Hungarian capital of Budapest was and remains a tourist destination. The fence was expensive and it did little good, with fewer than a dozen Hungarians trying to cross it anyway.
Gorbachev seemed not to bat an eye. To be completely sure that he had permission to proceed, Nemeth reminded Gorbachev that the USSR still had 80,000 troops stationed in Hungary. He didn’t want 1956 to happen again. Gorbachev told the Prime Minister, “If something happens, you can be certain that there will be no instruction or order from us to crush it.” That same day, Gorbachev met with the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, who asked Gorbachev to remove the nuclear weapons that had been held in Hungary for years. Gorbachev agreed on the spot. He decided to push his advantage. He said, “To distance us from the memories of 1956, I put it to you that all Soviet troops should leave Hungary.” Gorbachev agreed as well. He wanted to hold off to see if he could use the withdrawal as a bargaining chip to get NATO forces reduced in Europe. But as a sign of good faith, hundreds of tanks and 5,000 Soviet troops were withdrawn from Hungary.
The Hungarian were dumbfounded, and so was the East German leadership. Any border is only as strong as its weakest point. And by removing the barrier between Hungary and Austria, this was a major breach in the Iron Curtain. And in fact, none of the other Warsaw Pact countries had been consulted about this decision. The East Germans called the Hungarian leadership and were told that East Germans would not be permitted to use Hungary as a pit stop to flee to the West. Several days later, massive demonstrations took place in Budapest, and one leader stood in front of Parliament and proclaimed publicly that “history has pronounced its death sentence on the system called socialism.” Instead of incarceration, the only reaction was massive applause.
Several weeks later, the final details of Poland’s roundtable talks were agreed to. Solidarity would be legalized and given official recognition. One-third of the seats in the Lower House of Congress and all 100 seats in the Upper House, the Senate, would be democratically contested. This Polish government saw this not as a loss of power, but as a way of integrating the opposition into the state and validating its authority. It regarded it as a 10- to 15-year process toward a stable power-sharing arrangement.
But these trends were not the same throughout the Warsaw Pact. Romania, especially, went the other way. Communism often meant the elevation of the mediocre to the highest levels of power, and there are a few better examples of this than Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu. In a free country, Ceausescu would have been a mail room clerk baffled if a written address was mismatched between 757 Legion Street and 757 Legion Avenue. As Ceausescu grew older, his biggest skill was knowing how to work the system, which made him the right man at the right time to replace the Romanian leader when he died of cancer in 1965. No one particularly liked him, but no one particularly hated him. The totally mediocre gray man was the perfectly acceptable compromise candidate.
When he took over Romania, he did so as an unorthodox leader. In ‘68, for example, he denounced the Soviet Union’s invasion in Czechoslovakia, and he often didn’t follow Moscow’s lead in other matters. But, and this is a big but, in 1967, Ceausescu implemented Decree 770 in Romania, which aimed at increasing Romania’s population by 50%. Proclaiming that the fetus is the property of the entire society, both abortion and contraception were made illegal for women under the age of 40 or with fewer than four children. Not having a child was taxed, the marriage age was lowered to 15, and Romanian women of childbearing age were given mandatory gynecological exams every month by the menstrual police, where the traumatized woman would be forced to prove that she had, in fact, lost her child organically.
In 1971, Ceausescu visited both China and North Korea and was heavily inspired by the Stalinist personality cults by Chairman Mao and the great leader Kim Il-sung. And soon, Romanians were being constantly told about Ceausescu’s unparalleled brilliance and leadership skills. Part of the propaganda was expanded to include his wife Elena, whose completely nonexistent beauty was praised in terms just as highly as her utterly nonexistent intelligence was. As one historian put it, “As conditions inside Romania worsened, Romanians not only had to endure new privations, but also had to praise those responsible for inflicting them in increasingly fulsome terms.”
After dropping out of school at age 14, Elena had been expelled from adult education institute night school courses for cheating on a test. Nevertheless, as first lady in 1967, she received a fake PhD in chemistry. Ghost-written scientific papers were presented as having been written by this barely-educated woman, and the Romanian government lobbied international publications and organizations to publish her work and grant her honorary degrees. Then the media could reasonably speak of Elena being a world-renowned scientist, internationally published. Despite all this, she treated her subordinates with pure contempt, as the Romanian health minister described her as “very vain and almost illiterate, as well as unadulterated evil.”
As the 1970s proceeded, Ceausescu was smart and triangulated Romania between the USSR and the West in order to receive favors from both, and his efforts met with a great amount of success. Despite turning Romania into the the most authoritarian of the Soviet Bloc nations, his posturing against the USSR allowed him entrance into Western circles that were eager to exploit differences within the second world of communism. Nicolae and Elena waved from the White House balcony as guests of President Nixon and President Carter, and they danced with President Ford in the streets of Bucharest. Queen Elizabeth gave him a knight grand cross of the Order of the Bath, which is the highest award for a foreign leader.
As the 1980s rolled around, those international loans to Romania came due, and Ceausescu focused on exports at the expense of his own population. The price of goods and services increased dramatically, while cuts were made in government spending on housing, health care, and education. Food was strictly rationed. Television was limited three hours a day, with many neighborhoods not even having enough electricity for that. As one historian pointed out, “The sudden power cuts forced coal miners to climb up ladders in the dark at the end of their shifts or compelled surgeons to abort surgical procedures at the last moment.” This was in addition to infants whose life support systems were suddenly disconnected and patients whose iron lungs suddenly stopped.
Mortality rates among pregnant women and infants set European records in Romania. An entire generation was raised by government orphanages dedicated to children whose parents simply couldn’t afford to feed them and who were encouraged to abandon them to the superior care of state experts. Now, the government couldn’t afford to raise them well either, which result in years of room upon room of infants chained to their cribs in puddles of their own waste to little or no caretaker response. Malnutrition, which resulted in stunted growth and mental disabilities, was the norm, and both physical and sexual assault against the children, not uncommon. AIDS spread among the orphan population due to tainted and often medically unnecessary blood transfusions.
One British journalist was an eyewitness to the rooms in which these children were being raised. In addition to the pervasive smell of urine, he pointed out it was the silence that he found most disturbing. Usually when you enter a room packed with cots filled with children, the expectation is of a noise, chatter, or crying, sometimes even a wimper. There was none, even though the children were awake. “They lay in their cots, sometimes two to a cot, sometimes three, their eyes staring. Silently. It was eerie, almost sinister. They were inhuman. Stalls where children, babies, were treated like farm animals. No, I’m wrong. At least the animals felt brave enough to make a noise.”
Ceausescu’s holier-than-thou attitude increased over time as he began to believe all the propaganda fed to the Romanian people about his greatness. He was referred to as “the new morningstar,” “the living fire,” “the treasure of wisdom and charisma.” As Gorbachev put it, “I’ve encountered many ambitious people in my life. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a major politician without his share of vanity and self-confidence. In this sense, though, Ceausescu was in a class of his own.” An absolute ruler for decades, he always wore an arrogant smirk, treating others with apparent contempt, everyone from retainers to equal partners.
In 1984, Ceausescu laid the groundstone for the People’s House, which is a huge edifice, which was going to be five times the size of Versailles. It was going to be the heaviest building on Earth, and that was supposedly built for the Romanian people. It would serve the Ceausescus as the largest palace that had ever been constructed. Both the military and ordinary citizens were drafted to help in its construction, even though hundreds of citizens literally froze to death every year in the Romanian winter. Others died from asphyxiation due to turning on their stoves to provide heat, having the gas go out, and then having it come back on unlit. Eventually, construction costs for the People’s House was roughly the same as Romania’s entire welfare budget.
When Gorbachev visited Bucharest in 1987, he attempted to get Ceausescu to open his country to the outside world. Ceausescu thought this would be disastrous, both for communism and himself. He was not entirely wrong. And their arguments degenerated into shouting. Doors and windows were shut to make sure that no one could hear what was transpiring between the two leaders. In April 1989, about a week after the announcement of Poland’s roundtable agreement, Ceausescu had an announcement of his own. On the one hand, Romania’s foreign debt had now been paid off and months ahead of schedule. On the other hand, the rationing and lack of electricity would nevertheless continue. But this was a period when the Soviet Union had a much better relationship with the West, so there was no reason for Western countries to court Ceausescu as an antagonistic force against the USSR. The situation for the Romanian people seemed to be completely hopeless.
This was the backdrop to the Polish elections on June 4th, 1989. The communists had insisted on a swift vote, hoping it would reestablish their authority as Poland’s natural leaders. In fact, there was a concern in the Communist Party about what would happen if they won every election due to their popularity of the people because people would say that the election had been fixed. They needn’t have worried. There were 35 seats up for election in the Lower House. Solidarity won 33 of them in the first round of voting. There were 100 seats up in the Senate for election. Solidarity won 99. The Prime Minister, the Interior Minister, the Defense Minister who had all threatened to resign, it wasn’t a threat anymore. They were all voted out.
But would the party honor the results of the election? That was the big question on the table. But the crazy thing is, this wasn’t even the biggest news in the world that day, because June 4th, 1989, was the day of the Tiananman Square massacre.