1989! Part One

It is quite logical that on the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 events on the already breaking shelf with literary works about this year, which ended the short twentieth century, there were even more books. If we extend 1989, including the unification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991, then it will be more precisely to say-three years that ended the twentieth century. Books dedicated to the anniversary are retrospective journalistic chronicles, with bright personal memories and amazing details (Viktor Sebestien, Dieur Dalos, Michael Meyer and Michelle Meyer), lively works with the interpretation of history (Stephen Kotkin and Konstantin Pleshakov) and truly scientific studies based on archival archival documents, as well as on oral stories (Mary Eliz Sartt and a book edited by Jeffrey Endla). I can’t write a review for each separately. Most of them expands our knowledge a little, and some expand significantly. Without criticizing all these authors, I would like to say that in the aftertaste I have a dream of another book: the 1989 global integrated history, which has yet to be written.

1.

Over the past twenty years, the most interesting finds occurred in Soviet, American and German archives and, to a lesser extent, in East European, British and French. Basically, they shed light on the high policy of 1989-1991. For example, we learned that the Soviet Politburo did not even discuss what happened in Germany on November 9, 1989, on the day when the Berlin Wall was supposed to collapse, and instead he heard a full panic of the report of the Chairman of the Council of the USSR, Nikolai Ryzhkov on the preparation of the Baltic states for the exit from the USSR and the possible consequences of this step for Ukraine and Russia. “ The case smells full of collapse of M,” Ryzhkov said.

We find an interesting record of November 10 in the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, an assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he frantically rejoices in the fall of the Berlin Wall: “ That's what Gorbachev did ... He felt the tread of history and helped the story to find a natural direction .” And how is there ashamed to the British to find out that Margaret Thatcher shamelessly violated her promises to Germany, data from publicly. “ Words written in the NATO Communist may sound differently, but you do not pay attention to them, ” apparently, she said to Gorbachev in September 1989, according to the records of the conversation made by Chernyaev. " We do not want Germany to unite ." (Sartt also got a British record of this conversation thanks to the law on freedom of information adopted in the UK. She notes that “ there are no these comments in it, since the record was edited ”).

In accordance with the classic approach of the German historian Ranke to historical knowledge, now we know more than then, about these traditionally documented areas of high policy. And about the causes and social dynamics of the masses, populist steps, which led to the fact that the events of 1989 began to claim the role of a revolution or chain of revolutions, we, on the contrary, learned extremely little new.

I spent many hours of my life as part of folk crowds in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. They behaved inspired and, at the same time, mysteriously. What was unlike these men and women to take the streets, especially at the beginning, when there was no confidence in the safety of everything that was happening? What gathered them in the crowd? Which of Prazhan was the first to guess to pull a bunch of keys out of his pocket, raise it into the air and shake it? 300,000 people were repeated behind it, and the most amazing sound was obtained, similar to the chime of many Chinese bells.

Historians (such as George Ruda, whose pen belongs to an innovative study of the meaning of the phenomenon of the crowd for the French revolution) E.P. Tompson and Eric Hobskbaum, made attempts to understand the basic dynamics of the national protest of the early periods of the new time. Obviously, the time has come to modern historians who have at their disposal more advanced sources (kilometers of television, video and radio recordings, for example), take up the solution of this difficult task and try to analyze 1989 from the point of view of the masses, and not from the position of third-party observers.

Each writer about 1989 fights with an almost inevitable human drawback, which psychologists dubbed the “fortress with the back mind”. This is a tendency to perceive the failed historical events as more likely than those of their alternatives that seemed real before the beginning of these events (for example, the dispersal of demonstrations in central Europe is like what took place in Tiananmen Square) [1]. What happened seems quite logical. Henri Bergson spoke of "the illusions of retrospective determinism." The following are the explanations of what happened. As one scientist put it a few years after the events of 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain why this happened this way and not otherwise . Reading these books, I again remembered the words of the Polish philosopher Leshek Kolakovsky - the “law of endless cornfield”, which mean that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any specific event.

The big plus of the book “1989” Mary Eliz Sartt is that she clarifies the problem of “Fortress with the back of the mind” and methodically explores “unreasonable roads”. So she reminds us of how close to East Germany was on October 9, 1989 to bloodshelling: eight thousand people mobilized in Leipzig, including police officers, soldiers and staff of Stasi; And hospitals were ordered to cook beds for possible victims. She describes diplomatic models that were put on discussion, but were not executed in the formation of a new European order in 1990, including the model of the pan-European security system, which was based on the principle of separate existence of two German states.

Every writer has his own professional, geographical or industry bias. Journalists, politicians, diplomats, historians, political scientists, transitologists, researchers of public movements, economists, experts in safety, civil disobedience and international relations - all of them came by 1989 with their peculiar experience, methods, views and jargon. And often they say the same thing, only in different expressions.

Victory has many fathers, and each has their own favorites. Poles and Catholics love to emphasize the role of Pope, who was a Pole. They especially distinguish his enthusiastic visits to Poland in 1979, 1983 and 1987. The Germans and Hungarians focus on the contribution of Hungarian communist reformers who raised the “iron curtain” and helped many Eastern Germans flee. (Michael Meyer in a book that is replete with vivid personal memories of the events that he became witnessing, working as a Newsweek correspondent, calls this a “unexplored history” of 1989; that, in English, is possibly unrequited, but in German-told many times). Russophiles usually pay tribute to Gorbachev. The Germans who sympathize with left -wing ideas leave a place for their version of the weakening of tension, called the “Ostapolitic” (Eastern Politics). The Americans-conservatives extol the efforts of Ronald Reagan. (Roman Ratnezar made his insignificant book about Reagan’s speech “Demote this wall” in Berlin as the following words: “The city, president and speech that ended the Cold War”).

In this variety of views there is nothing wrong. Each illuminates its part of the elephant, or considers the entire elephant, but at its own angle. However, as soon as the author grabs one detail and claims that this is an explanation of the whole event, this is the key to understanding, here we can say that he is mistaken.

Unfortunately, Stephen Kotkin, an eminent historian, a specialist in the Soviet Union, falls into this trap when he turns to the history of countries that know not too well [2]. His book “Negrading Society” contains many substantial, interesting historical explanations of the fall of communism, but everything spoils the frankly revisionist statement that 1989 was, as the subtitle of the book was saying, nothing more than the “fiasco communist establishment”. This establishment of the party state, that is, “non -citizenship society” (in contrast to the imaginary or idealized “civil society”, glorified by dissidents and Western intellectuals of that time) and “broke its own system”. In addition to Poland, "focus on the opposition was from the field of fiction."

His argument reaches the climax in the next phrase: "The GDR is a financial pyramid that went bankrupt due to panic." In a school lesson, this statement may go for a provocation. And for a serious book it is too curious. In fact, thanks to the exhaustive study of historians such as Andre Steiner and Jeffrey Kopstein, we have a clear idea of ​​the scale of the external debt of the GDR and how this affected communist leaders in the fall of 1989. Having become the head of the party after Erich Honecker, who hid the seriousness of the problem from most of his colleagues, and in a sense, and from himself, Egon Krenz demanded an honest report on the country's economic situation. At the end of October, he was informed that the GDR "absolutely depends on the loans of the capitalist countries." But the state is not a bank and even more not a financial pyramid. States can exist long enough, being burdened with huge debts. States will not be so simply bankrupt.

And the GDR was a special state: the Soviet zone of occupation was turned into a satellite of the Soviet Union. Until the nuclear superpower was ready to bear the burden of her satellite states, the GDR could continue to exist [3]. But Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers considered that the best way to modernize the Soviet Union lies through large -scale cooperation with another Germany, Germany, and other Western partners. Gorbachev felt that he should not risk such a prospect, supporting repression in the GDR. If he or another Soviet leader made a different choice, the GDR would have lived for many years - like a poor country, weighed down by debts and tormented by crises. There is no doubt about this. And this would be not the first such example in history.

A metaphor with panic bankruptcy, to which Kotkin often returns, shows other defects in his theory. During panic bankruptcy, the masses of people, succumbing to panic, are completely inconsistent with the banks to take their savings. They have no other goals. They act inorganized. They do not voice their ideas about how to make a bank better, especially how to come up with another banking system as part of another state structure. Apparently, Kotkin wants to argue with this [4]. Constantly waiting for development according to the Polish scenario, he sees in the crowds that took to the streets in 1989, only “public mobilization in the absence of an appropriate public organization”.

Turning to the rapid transition during the “velvet” revolution in Czechoslovakia from folk demonstrations to the common strike that covered the whole country, he writes: “ Nothing of this was inspired or led by dissidents or civil forum, which was abolished shortly after the events of 1989. ” It turns out that the general strike gave rise to itself. When 300,000 people on the Obroelas Square chanted “ Gavel on the city! "(Gavel-to the castle!), This did not mean that the biography, personality or obvious leadership qualities of Gavel had some relation to this. Because it was another “fiasco” of the communist establishment. For everyone who was there or who simply reads the full details of the work of Czech or Western historians who have studied the “velvet” revolution in all details, this statement is no more wealthy than an example with a financial pyramid. This is a stilt revisionism.

The essence of such events when the mobilization of the masses and civil disobedience occurs, provided that there are some prerequisites (including even tiny opposition groups and political prisoners, isolated from the people, such as Havel or Aun San Su Zi) in the fact that various forms of public organizations, such as the civil forum, emerging suddenly, often chaotical, but nevertheless, they can arise with organizations, can arise with Incredible speed. This phenomenon of 1989 historians should be more closely studied, not rejected. The statements that folk and opposition forces in the east of Central Europe are not related to the fall of the communist system is no less absurd than the allegations that the “people” alone overthrew communism and destroyed the empire with nuclear weapons. As always in the historical process, strength and device should be perceived in relations.

Notes:

[1] See the constructive article by Barukh Fishhoff, “A view of the past ≠ foresight, the consequences of the final knowledge of judgment in a situation of uncertainty”, “Journal of experimental psychology: human perception and behavior”, part 1, No. 3, 1975

[2] On the title sheet it is written “Stephen Kotkin, with the participation of Jan T. Gross,” and the preface states that the idea of ​​the book originated in Princeton at the seminar, which the authors were conducted jointly. But nowhere is the detailed description of the contribution of Gross. Since Gross is an outstanding historian, a specialist in modern Poland, I will undertake to assume that his contribution was made in the head of Poland, which is the least weak in the sense that I described below.

[3] Of course, it would be too difficult if most of the Eastern Germans fled to the west through Hungary. But this counterattack clearly implies that Moscow ordered other satellite states, including Hungary, not to open the “iron curtain” in front of the GDR citizens, as before.

[4] In the afterword, Kotkin says that “ the priceless metaphor of panic bankruptcy was invented by Stephen L. Solnik for the Soviet Union in the book“ Steal the State: Control and Failure of Communist Institutions ”(Cambridge: Harvarl University Pres, 1999). But Solnik uses this metaphor in order to describe how officials rob the state. “ Unlike panic bankruptcy ,” Solnik writes, “ officials unclean in the hands were not depositors who legally demand their savings, but by the employees of the state, appropriating its savings .” The features of such “privatization by nomenclature” were observed during the transition period in the eastern part of Central Europe, but such behavior does not explain the events of the fall of 1989 in East Germany or Czechoslovakia. This metaphor in the analysis of Suns clarifies the situation with the Soviet Union, but it is transferred to the eastern part of the part of Central Europe by misunderstanding.

To be continued...