1989: a lifetime for freedom

[David Votoupal]

My surname and heritage is Czech. Dad left Czechoslovakia 40 years ago, after the Soviet invasion, and didn't visit for 21 years. Many of those who fled and their offspring, not least myself, had their political views shaped by history. And when we all watched the systems come down and the old countries win back their freedom, tears of joy were cried.

This month marks 20 years since the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, two events symbolising the end of the Cold War. But the struggle for freedom in the "Eastern Bloc" is a much longer story, especially in the nations of Central Europe (not Eastern, since dad is particularly indignant about the lumping of his old country with the "East")- Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary- where resistance to Communist regimes was at its strongest. After all these countries had the right to determine their own future taken from them by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. And to know why the resistance was so strong, you have to know the histories of those countries, and why it still reverberates so strongly today, 20 years later.

In fact, it was Poland and Hungary where the real unraveling of the vile system began in 1988-89, in remarkably peaceful fashion when both government and opposition movements agreed a phased transition to democracy. And it was those two countries that also offered the first signs of resistance in 1956. And as we all know, the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a great tragedy. Then came 1968, where the Prague Spring was a similarly brave attempt to break free- driven by reformists within the ruling party and the intellectual class- and ending in a similar tragedy. But hope remained, when Charter 77 appeared nine years later.

Poland offered the strongest mass resistance to Communist rule, partly because of the staunch Catholicism of the populace, and partly because the overwhelming participation of the working population in peaceful resistance. Protests in 1956, 1970 and 1976 were put down by force. There's no doubt about it, Solidarity were the greatest freedom fighters of our time, a show of extraordinarily brave defiance that amazed the free world in 1980-81.

As early as 1988, following strikes, secret negotiations began between the regime and Solidarity, leading to the Round Table Talks of 1989 and then, amazingly, to free elections. In Hungary the government and the various opposition groups held similar Round Table Talks that would lead to free elections in 1990. In fact one of the most incredible things about it all was that Poland went to the polls at the same time of the Tienanmen Square protests.

In Czechoslovakia, however, things happened differently. There were protests early in 1989 to mark the 20th anniversary of Jan Palach's self-immolation. But the hardline government wouldn't budge, even under pressure from Gorbachev. The regime in East Germany took a similar hard line before protests there began. The protests in October were followed by a crackdown, but the changes took place at lightning speed- first the removal of hardliners from the Communist leadership, and then the beginning of the transition to democracy, the return of Alexander Dubcek to parliament, the election of Vaclav Havel...

It was joyous for sure. Many of the older generation finally saw freedom restored, the young got their first taste of freedom in their lives. And to those who made it possible, we say thank you.

 

[midfielder]

David

Living in Australia I can not imagine what suffering these good folk went tho... I can recall watching the wall come and we sat (me and the wife) and watched well into the wee small hours...

Always thinking we are watching history unfold before us...on C&N & ABC ...

Yes a great time ..... it was freedom .... we take for it granted BUTTT  Freedom is such a great gift ...

I arrived back today from Fiji ... I have been working there the past two weeks... that place is on it's arse because of it's government ... just makes you appreciate home more... Just look John Howard lost power and K 07 came in without a single gun shot...

Also  Della & the Witch ... got stuck into the staff and Bang the staff hit back ... gotta love this place sometimes (except Scumcastle)

Nice post mate..!!

 

[FFC Mariner]

and we had a revolution without a shot being fired.............

 

[David Votoupal]

My dad got to see his grandfather, who fought in two World Wars, and lived to see the end of Communism- he died, I recall, not long before he would have celebrated his 100th birthday that year. My last surviving grandparent, my grandmother, passed away earlier this year.

Freedom is a precious gift, that's why I will fight to stop the left-wing PC brigade from trying to stamp on it to pander to certain groups.

You can't begin to imagine what countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland went through and the relief at the end of it for all. Even a lot of Communists had enough of the Soviet system. But at the same time we've seen some things haven't changed, the former Communist elites in places like Bulgaria took advantage of the new system to enrich themselves.

 

[Lisarow Yellow (Pooley)]

Freedom is a precious gift, that's why I will fight to stop the left-wing PC brigade from trying to stamp on it to pander to certain groups.

cause right-wing nutter's have always supported freedom.

i agree with you. freedom is something you can never take for granted, but please refrain from putting down the left when the right can be just as bad.

 

[David Votoupal]

Many still haven't forgotten the atrocities committed by the Red Army during and after the war. The Baltic states- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia- were illegally annexed by the Soviet Union and this was never recognised by the West.

The fact is, Czechoslovakia and Hungary held democratic elections right after the war, and the will of the people was disregarded by the Soviets and their Communist supporters. In Poland, there was not even that- the government-in-exile in London could not return (and remained there until 1990 in fact), and rigged elections would be held.

The early years of Stalinist rule were extremely brutal in these countries, but De-Stalinisation led to a removal of some of its most gruesome aspects (e.g. serfdom in the Soviet Union), and a mild liberalisation of science and culture etc compared to what came before. It also led to the first real insurrection in Poland (Poznan in 1956) and then the Hungarian Revolution which would be brutally crushed. It wasn't until the Prague Spring in 1968 that we saw the next attempt to break away from that control. That too was crushed.

Yugoslavia and Romania had remained Communist but managed to break free from Soviet domination, by establishing a West-friendly neutrality. Romania, however, remained avowedly Stalinist to the end.

Poland, however, was where the fiercest resistance to the system took place, and hence you saw the events of 1956, 1970 and then Solidarity. And most importantly this resistance had overwhelming participation from the working populace.

 

[dibo]

i didn't realise we had a rump of neo-stalinists on here who needed convincing, but ok...

 

[FFC Mariner]

Sleepers awaiting the glorious day

 

[dibo]

i couldn't do it. i love election night way too much...

i'm a reformist from way back.

 

[dibo]

Mark Colvin on the ABC site:

Laughing to keep out the dark

I remember the jokes. They were usually about one of two things: hardship or fear.

It's been strange, this week, to reflect that most people will never know, as I did (albeit as a visitor) what it was really like in the old Soviet Bloc.

But the jokes used to tell the story.

An American dog, a Polish dog and a Russian dog are talking. The American dog says, "Where I live it's good. You bark loudly enough, and they give you meat". The Polish dog says, "What's meat?" The Russian dog says, "What's bark?"

Why have they brought in this new law in Moscow that the bread shops have to be separated by two kilometres? To keep the queues apart.

I was in Poland, in the autumn of 1981. Lech Walesa had founded the national Trade Union, Solidarity, the year before, and with the tacit support of the Polish Pope, had reached unprecedented heights of popularity. The rectangular red and white 'Solidarnosc' badges were on every second lapel. But people feared (rightly as it turned out) that the crackdown would come soon. Hence the joke I was told:

"You've heard they're making round Solidarnosc badges now? Easier to swallow."

In much-invaded Poland there was also bitterness about the neighbours - on both sides.

"If the Russians and the East Germans invaded tonight, which would you shoot first? The Germans. Why? Duty before pleasure."

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, silenced by the tanks, they came out and painted the jokes on the walls:

"Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world? Because it doesn't even interfere in its own internal affairs."

Were these jokes a form of samizdat - the underground literature of communism, but in oral form - or were they actually a sort of safety-valve, tacitly allowed by the regimes, and even used by them as an early warning system for public disaffection?

There's academic disagreement about that, but one thing is clear: that at one time in Communist history, jokes were very dangerous indeed.

As Ben Lewis points out, archival research by the dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev on political prisoners indicated that 200,000 people went to jail in Stalin's time for the sole 'crime' of telling a joke. Many of them were not released until after the dictator's death.

Sending people to the gulag for a one-liner, of course, was small beer to Stalin.

The Oxford historian Professor Archie Brown estimates that 10 to 20 million people died - directly or indirectly - because of Stalin's orders or his policies. You can hear an extended interview with him here.

Note that the figure - 10 to 20 million - does not include the 25 million who died in the Second World War. Professor Brown says several million of those died because Stalin had purged the army, meaning that he had had many of its most competent officers killed, so the first part of the Soviet campaign against Hitler was profoundly wasteful.

My own first encounter with Soviet bloc communism in action was in Mongolia in 1971.

I was, as I've written here before, a student on vacation, visiting my father, the British Ambassador in Ulan Bator.

It was strange living in the Embassy: you always had to be careful what you said. The Embassy had one phone line, but there were no fewer than six telephone cables coming out of the building - and for no apparent reason, they were all routed via the sentry-box outside.

British Foreign Office 'sweepers' would come out periodically from London to de-bug the building. Then, in a ritual dance, 'heating technicians' would arrive from the Mongolian Interior Ministry, (the city ran on a centralised heating system) and re-bug it.

On one celebrated occasion my father used this fact to his advantage. The low-security, but sealed, diplomatic bags that came in via Moscow had been opened at some point - either by the Russians or by the Mongolians themselves. Dad had lodged a protest, but met a brick wall. So that night, during dinner, he motioned us for silence, sat back in his chair, and delivered a loud, clear monologue at the ceiling.

The import of his lengthy remarks was that, not only was Her Majesty's Government angry at what had happened, it was absolutely livid. Indeed, he had received a highly secret cable from London that very afternoon saying that, unless a full apology was forthcoming within 24 hours, he was to break off diplomatic relations, pack up the Embassy and go home.

Promptly at 8:00 the next morning, an emissary of the Foreign Minister was at the front door in a car, ready to transport him to the Ministry to receive the grovelling apology he had asked for.

Of course, with diplomatic privilege, being bugged had few real consequences: but for ordinary people all over the Communist world, the possibility of microphones in the walls was a daily fear.

Hence the sense that you always had, even in the flats of dissidents, that it was not quite safe to talk freely. It might be all right for you - a tourist in other people's oppression.

Hence, whether I working was in Warsaw, Budapest or Moscow, the need to go for walks, or conduct interviews in cars, and even then, always to wonder whether I was endangering my interviewees' safety or even their life.

The jokes were all part of the duplicity of life under totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, and it was a doubleness that was everywhere; always there was that sense of the overground and the underground, separated by what people really thought but could seldom actually say out loud.

My father and I used to go fishing on long summer afternoons in Mongolia, a country where religion was banned, apart from a single (licensed and closely observed) monastery in Ulan Bator.

In the wild, after long drives across the steppes, miles from the nearest town, we would always find them: prayer flags, tied to branches, flying over springs and rivulets, in homage to the gods and spirits of wood and water.

We never saw anyone leaving them or praying at them, but half a century after the religion (closely related to Tibetan Buddhism) had been 'eliminated', the resistance remained.

That was how it was, in different ways, in all the Soviet satellite countries - always the silent resistance and the jokes, and that's why, when the Wall came down, the whole system collapsed: the domino theory the Americans feared in Vietnam actually worked in reverse, so the dominos fell all the way back to Moscow. There was just no will any longer to keep up the pretence.

Is there a danger it could come back, if we allow what happened to fade in memory?

It seems incredibly unlikely in many of the former East European client-states: they're mostly either in the European Union already, or on their way in, and even the global financial crisis has done little to revive the cold Communist Parties.

As for Russia, the habits of totalitarianism have certainly died hard: a poll recently showed Stalin was still the third most popular historical figure of all time, and the Medvedev/Putin Government has been busy trying to stop people from "besmirching" his memory, or writing too much about the Gulags.

But even in Russia, Marxism-Leninism itself - redistribution of property and the means of production, driven always by the Central Role Of The Party - is probably gone for good.

All that remain are the memories - and the jokes, dark and pungent like the bread.

Brezhnev is being driven through the countryside when his limousine hits a pig. An angry crowd approaches from the nearest village. He sends the chauffeur to pacify them. Cowering behind darkened windows, he sees the chauffeur approach the mob and start to talk. Suddenly they start to cheer, and carry him back, shoulder-high in triumph. He gets back in the car and they drive away. Brezhnev, astonished, asks "How did you manage that?" "I don't know", says the driver. I just said "I'm Brezhnev's driver: I killed the pig."

"Here in the Soviet Union we have a pretend economy. They pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

And finally, the one that, with hindsight on the events of 1989, you could interpret as prophetic: "Capitalism is teetering on a precipice. Soon Communism will overtake it."

 

[FFC Mariner]

Brezhnev one is quite funny

 

[Arabmariner]

A football related story to life in a communist state.

In 1986 a mate travelled to Craiova in Romania for a UEFA cup tie between the locals and DUFC.

After a couple of days in the country the handful of fans who travelled ended up at the team hotel where the players brought food out to them.My mate said it was impossible to buy food anywhere.

That was the season we made the UEFA Final and one of the players said in a documentary made recently this was the thing he remembered most about that season.......how poor the locals were and how the fans were starving because they couldn't buy food.

It certainly opened my mates eyes as to how much we took for granted at home.

 

[David Votoupal]

Footballers were nominally amateur in Communist countries, but in reality they were professionals who lived better lives than the average person. It's ironic that the A-League's cap and draft system is criticised (rightly or wrongly) as a "socialist" system, when yet no Communist state ever adopted such a system to its football because they knew it would be a disincentive for quality.

Another football-related one... when Dynamo Berlin hosted Nottingham Forest in a European Cup tie, many of the locals supported Forest over the hated Stasi team, whose blatant cheating gave them 10-in-a-row success at home.