Perspectives on 1989

Witness Seminar

Perspectives on 1989

gov.uk/fco

Perspectives on 1989

A seminar held in the Locarno Suite of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, on 29 November 2019, to launch Documents on British Policy Overseas: Series III, Volume XII: Britain and the Revolutions in Eastern Europe 1989

Edited by Richard Smith FCO Historians

Participants: Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, Minister for Eastern Europe, 1988-90.

Gill Bennett, former FCO Chief Historian.

Misha Glenny, Central Europe correspondent, The Guardian, 1986-89, BBC World Service, 1989-93.

Sir John Birch, Head of the Eastern European Department, FCO, 1983-86 and Ambassador to Hungary, 1989-95.

Sarah Taylor, Europe Director, FCO (chair).

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RICHARD SMITH: Good afternoon, everybody. It’s my great pleasure to welcome you to the Foreign Office for the launch of our latest DBPO volume on Britain and the Revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989.

I know that many of you, looking around the room, played a great role in those events 30 years ago. And I can also see that many of you may not have been born 30 years ago. But no matter, you’re all welcome.

And the events of that year, just to reflect, were truly momentous. It was the year that communist rule in Eastern Europe finally ended, with mass demonstrations, an end to oneparty rule, opening of borders, and free elections.

Outlawed organisations, like Solidarity, suddenly became parties of government. Dissidents like Václav Havel suddenly found themselves as presidents. Dictators like Nicolae Ceauşescu suddenly found that their long and tyrannous rule ended in a matter of days. And, of course, it was the time when the most potent symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, finally opened.

The volume of documents we have produced charts the events of this historic year through the eyes of British diplomats. It contains reporting from British embassies on the rapidly changing political scene, and also documents attempts in London to develop policy against a backdrop of unfolding revolutions.

I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank all of my colleagues who assisted with the production of the volume, in particular Paul Bali, Tara Finn, Luke Gibbon, and also the current and former Chief Historians Gill Bennett and Patrick Salmon.

The format for the afternoon is very simple. We’ve assembled a panel containing a politician, a journalist, a diplomat, and a historian. Maybe shades of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? I don’t know. But they’re going to give us differing perspectives on 1989. And I’d like to hand over now to the chair, the Director for Europe, Sarah Taylor. Thank you very much.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you, Richard, and thank you, everybody, for being here. I hope we can have a really lively and fruitful discussion of these events, not only as an opportunity to reflect on, as Richard has said, a series of momentous changes to this continent, any one of which could have resulted in all-out war, but which in this particular set of circumstances didn’t. But also to perhaps discuss together what might be the lessons for current policymakers, and indeed the traps of optimism that those events might give us now.

But let me introduce our panel very briefly, because they don’t need much description from me. We have Lord Waldegrave, a former minister for Europe. We have Misha Glenny, who was a central Europe correspondent for The Guardian and then for the BBC World Service.

Sir John Birch, my predecessor here in the FCO, as head of Eastern Europe Department. And Gill Bennett, a former FCO historian who continues to be very distinguished in this field.

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I’m going to ask each of our panellists to talk for five to 10 minutes, and reflecting on their experiences of the time, and then I will open it up to questions. But first, Lord Waldegrave over to you.

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: Thank you very much. It’s an extraordinary privilege to be back in these understated rooms. Just over there is the India Office Conference Room.

Whenever I held a meeting with a number of officials to discuss something at length, one of my private secretaries, either Mr Darroch or Mr Simon Fraser, or Mr Dominic Asquith, or other people of that kind, would come in white-faced and say, the Foreign Secretary is departing the office. Because it happened twice to me.

First of all, Geoffrey Howe, and then John Major.

And what could have been better for me? Because it left me with perhaps a little more space to cause trouble for officials than would otherwise have been the case. I wasn’t just the Minister for Europe. I was also interfering in South Africa, and in the rest of Africa, and in the Middle East, where I had a certain amount of trouble with Mr Shamir and Mr Netanyahu, who was my opposite number then.

He, like Mr Brian Davis, who greeted me by name, a uniformed attendant at the gate down below - ‘you and I arrived here on the same day, sir’, he said. And his career and Mr Netanyahu’s in their respective roles have continued in a more logical and stable manner than mine.

It was an extraordinary time. It was a time of such hope. It’s difficult not to get emotional about it. And I apologise for those who weren’t born then, because they won’t understand what we’re talking about. Everything seemed to be going through dangerous times, but going in the right direction, not only incidentally in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but in South Africa and in the Middle East, even, for a time as well.

It was exciting. My nostalgia at being back here is partly because of the quality of the people I worked with here, some of whom I’m glad to see in front of me. The density, if that’s the right word, the thickness of the quality of people in the Foreign Office. It has been somewhat hollowed out over subsequent years by cuts and reforms of various kinds.

There are still wonderful people in the Foreign Office. Don’t misunderstand me. But they have to work even harder than the ones in those days, because there are fewer of them. I just reeled off the names of three of my private secretaries: they could afford such people to look after junior ministers, although I was also in charge at a ministerial level of PUSD. I 4

was cheered by one of the murky people arriving in my room one day with a piece of paper which they’d stolen off the Soviet Union saying, this young minister, they plan promotion for him. So the Russians knew more about that than I did. But it was very cheering at the time.

I’m going to pick out one or two themes. Do buy this volume. It’s wonderful. It’s fascinating to think, as Charles Powell and I have just been saying, that there’s not going to be much of this in the future. The combined effect of my dear friend Peter Hennessy pushing freedom of information too far and too short, plus modern technology, means that not so many things are going to be written down for the historian in the future.

We’ll be back to the early 19th century. We’ll be back to pre-Hankey. We’ll be back to all that, where the Prime Minister will shout down the stairs, ‘what did we agree? It doesn’t matter, as long as we all say the same thing’, and all that.

So we are privileged. You are privileged, you historians of this generation, to have such beautifully written paper documents to work with. They show the quality of the people.

They really do. There’s lots of good disagreement, and I’ll pick out a few themes to show.

One of the things that we were always wrestling with, of course, was when to push and when to help. [Robert] Cooper, another great man, who’d succeeded David Gore-Booth in the Planning Staff has a good minute in here on page 69 saying that the objective is not to prop up a somewhat reformed Soviet empire.

And, of course, there was the running debate about Glasnost which goes back beyond this period. Were you actually helping the people or were you helping the regimes by giving them loans? Welcoming them into the community relations seemed the friendly thing to do.

But then, when you talk to the people on the ground, it was very annoying for them that we were sometimes taken in by the smiles on the face of the tiger.

There are good locuses [sic] for that argument in here. Mr Fawcett on Bulgaria, right at the beginning, rather cross that we wouldn’t pay any attention to Bulgaria. Rightly, in my view because Bulgaria was a wholly unsatisfactory place. The more they claimed that they were changing the less they changed.

Another great thing for those who were there is that you get the beautiful minutes about what happened, but you don’t quite, of course, get the feel. I had been a friend of somebody called Georgi Markov, who the Bulgarians murdered, and of his wife, I think with the permission of the Soviet Union here. And I thought we should use that as a little bit of a test case to see whether they’d really changed.

When I met Mr Gotsev in Bulgaria, he said he was obviously murdered by the British secret police in order to discredit the People’s regime in Bulgaria. So I didn’t quite know what to do. What I did do was get up and walk out into the dusty corridor outside, where there was an old lady dressed in black sweeping aimlessly in the corridor. And there was a pause, and my officials joined me.

I think I was thought to be being not very diplomatic in these things, but I didn’t think that was wrong, actually. It was a small case of a bigger issue that you had to find good tests as 5

to whether there was real reform, or whether they were just trying to get cheap money, because the Russians weren’t giving them any money anymore.

It was a tiny version of the much bigger issue, for example, of our acknowledging what we’d known since the beginning to be true, who had actually done the massacres at Katyn, which for a long time, we weren’t quite brave enough to acknowledge. And there were other cases like that.

It’s wonderful to see Michael Burton here, who was on the Notev case. Martin Notev, a young boy, 21 years old, who swam across onto our side of the river [Spree] and got his hands on our side of the river, which meant he was safe. And a Stasi boat came and knocked him off, dragged him by the hair back into the river. And led by Michael, we made a most frightful fuss. All the Allies did in Berlin.

This is my second theme - things go faster when they start to go than people think. Michael and I well remember Mr Momper, the Mayor of West Berlin, a man of the people with a leather jacket. And we had to go down and have dinner with him, I think, in his pub to show that he was a man of the people.

And he told me, ‘you can make a fuss if you like, but the Wall’s going to be with us for years.

It’s a lawyer who gets them back in the end. Don’t make a fuss. You know, we have to live with it. It’s all very well for you coming from London and going away again. The Wall’s going to be there for years’. That was August of ’89.

Things go faster, and there is always a hazard. Please, ex-Ambassadors, don’t be offended by this, that quite often, I found it was better to talk to the youngsters in the embassies who were out on the streets. Because the grandees were inevitably talking to other grandees.

And it’s very difficult if one grandee is talking to another not to think that that other grandee is just as permanent as you are.

So quite often, things went faster than the people at the top were seeing. If you talk to the people who were wandering about in an evening having a schnapps, or whatever it was.

They were picking up the vibes quicker. So things went faster, and regime talks to regime.

And it’s very difficult for regimes to realise that the whole of the structure of who they are going to talk to is not going to be there in a year’s time. I don’t blame the people who are writing here saying that things are going to take a long time, and don’t think things are going to happen quickly. It never feels like that until suddenly, it all goes quickly.

Then there was the perennial issue, where I got into trouble. The last time we did a seminar on this, I got into trouble with Charles [Powell]. As I got into trouble with his boss, with all our boss, Mrs Thatcher at the time. Because I thought over the reunification of Germany, she was being too careful of Gorbachev. But that was a high policy far beyond my pay grade, really, and she was quite right to be worried about it.

But there are some issues of the same kind in here. I’m rather proud to find myself being very young, political, and so annoying for the great men who I had to deal with, but being very punchy about the Baltic States, where there’s an excellent minute from my friend 6

Simon Hemans in here saying, we mustn’t give up the recognition policy at all. We’re not saying that the Helsinki Final Act means the borders of Europe are never going to change.

We never recognised their incorporation, and we don’t now. But there was a bit of pressure from somewhere to say, come on. It’s awfully difficult for Gorbachev. And we must leave that on one side, and perhaps give him something. Glad we didn’t.

So that’s a bit of a theme, the high politics, where she was quite right, of course, that Gorbachev was the key to it all, the fact that he’d stopped them machine gunning in the middle of the streets. Clearly, it was a huge interest of not just the West, but of the world that he shouldn’t be pushed over by hardliners in the middle of all this in Moscow, and we had to be conscious of that. And that was sensible.

Being young and enthusiastic, I was also conscious of being told with my PUSD hat on that he was telling us the most frightful fibs about biological warfare in Russia, and so on. But she took a higher view about that, and said, well, yes, but that’ll be dealt with one day. Don’t make a fuss about that now.

So for those youngsters never born, this picture of Mrs Thatcher as being an absolutely hardline, uncompromising person: not at all. She could be extremely pragmatic and careful when she wanted to be.

Then, the final of my five little points that I was going to make was that I’m quite pleased to see myself here not trying to be an imitation official. There are certain kinds of ministers who try and make themselves into officials. And that’s a bad idea, because officials are better than them, and there are plenty of officials anyway. They’re supposed to bring something else. They’re supposed to bring a political bit of input into it. So I’m quite proud to find myself here belabouring these communists.

And I’m very pleased to be reminded of the excellent interview I had with the head of one of the universities. I think it was in Prague, who when we were talking about giving aid from British universities to help them free their universities he said, look, just remember you’ve got more communists in your universities than we have in ours.

[LAUGHTER] I’m proud of the small part I had alongside officials in the setting up of the Know How Funds, which was a very good initiative. And I’m proud of a bit of friendly nepotism, appointing my friend Kate Mortimer, who sadly died, who actually did wonderful work along with others in those funds.

I was very pro-Hungarian, you’ll find in here. I had a wonderful visit to Poland and came away admiring the romance and the gloom. I thought it would be very difficult for them to make progress. I was wrong. They’ve done exceptionally well.

I became rather friendly with Mr Németh, who’s opening his borders to Austria, I think it’s one of the underrated moments of the whole story. In a way, he let the whole thing change.

I think Mr Németh was a very good man, and I was very proud to see him a few years ago.

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I was optimistic about Hungary because I had once worked for somebody called Victor Rothschild who at the time of [Nicholas] Kaldor and [Thomas] Balogh [i.e. the 1960s and ’70s] used to like to alarm ministers by saying that his grandmother was Hungarian, and that the definition of a Hungarian was a man who could go into a revolving door behind you and come out in front.

So I thought the Hungarians were jolly good at wrangling their way through. And they did do well, but the subsequent politics has, of course, been complicated. So I’m proud of the fact that I pushed to say, when it came to giving the Know How Funds, for example, don’t give them a third of what you give to Poland.

Actually, they may get ahead, so don’t give them tiny sums. It makes one so frustrated. We were arguing about £5 million or something. When I subsequently became Chief Secretary, you could find £5 million in the top drawer without noticing, or just by putting the date in a different place for some cash flow.

[LAUGHTER] It does make one a little annoyed. There we were, and we got £25 million for Poland and £25 million for Hungary. Well, that was something in those days. That was jolly good against the background, but I wish we’d done more.

So it makes me proud and nostalgic of British foreign policy, Allied foreign policy at that time, and how difficult it is just at the moment, to go back to a time when everything seemed so hopeful. Thank you.

And when he [Misha Glenny] was beaten up, I did make a protest. That made him feel much better.

[LAUGHTER] SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Lord Waldegrave. I’m going to move on to Misha Glenny, who like Lord Waldegrave, also features in this book - for being beaten up and arrested. And we look forward to hearing what he has to offer. Thank you.

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MISHA GLENNY: Thank you very much. So I was very fortunate. In 1981, I received a grant from the British Council. I have a lot to thank the British Council for, because they enabled me to spend 10 months in Prague during the period that I refer to as mature normalisation.

And that meant I was able to learn a great deal about how Czechs in particular, but to a lesser extent Slovaks as well, actually led their lives in this system. Because, of course, the public space was so constrained that nobody really bothered with it. And so they sought to experience, articulate themselves, and enjoy themselves in the private space.

But actually, there were grey areas which all of us were able to exploit, including myself. I went there having told the British Council and the Czech authorities, the Czech-Slovak authorities, that I was going to study the dramatic theories of Karel ÄŒapek.

And although I probably know more about Karel ÄŒapek than most people in the room here, I had absolutely no intention of spending my time at the Charles University reading obscure texts. Instead, I went and got several jobs. I was basically a freelancer living in a student hostel and writing and reading advertising material for Zetor Tractors.

I translated several rock albums while I was there. And I became an assistant to the head of dubbing at the Barrandov Studios’ older chairman, who later became head of Czech Foreign Intelligence. And together, we translated Alien from English into Czech.

About 25 years later, I was sitting next to John Hurt at a dinner. And I was able to say to him, I translated you into Czech. He was absolutely thrilled.

What was interesting about it was that you could survive. You could sort of duck, and dive, and dodge, and weave. Even in societies that apparently from the outside look very close, there were spaces in which you could operate.

And particularly in the 1980s, we saw these spaces getting bigger and bigger, although, of course, there were some countries where things were more constrained than others. I see Jonathan Eyal sitting here in the front. Of course, Romania was a very difficult place to find interesting grey spaces compared to some of the others.

But of course, Czechoslovakia was regarded as one of the most authoritarian states in the 1980s, and yet there was always fun to be had. And as a BBC correspondent and a Guardian correspondent beforehand, I could seek out stories that others had usually missed. My favourite one was in 1986.

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In late 1986, when I came across an avant-garde composer in Brno, the capital of Moravia, who had composed an opera of three movements called ‘In Homage to Vasil’ Bil’ak’. Now, I don’t know if you remember Vasil’ Bil’ak, but he was one of the hardliners who ousted Dubcek in 1968 on the back of Soviet tanks.

And I met this ludicrously eccentric composer who waxed lyrical about his third movement, which was ‘Vasil’ Bil’ak Gives a Landmark Interview to the Spiegel Magazine’. And he played big parts of this cacophonous, cacophonous composition.

I’ve never known to this day, whether he was being serious or whether he was being completely, completely ludicrous, but there were all sorts of stories like this going on. Some of them were simply horrifying.

I did a long study for New Scientist, which was one of the magazines that I worked as a stringer for, on the pollution in what was known as the Triangle of Death, which was northern Bohemia, Chomutov, Most, and that area. And then Karl Marx Stadt, Halle, Chemnitz and so on and Katowice, Krakow, where you could see the consequences of environmental devastation everywhere you went. And of course, there was no accountability at all.

On these issues, in fact, more than some other human rights issues, Charter 77, Solidarity, and some of the East German Lutheran groups were doing fantastic work on detailing the science of what was going on in their countries at very grave personal risk. And I certainly salute them.

But if we look at 1989, I’ve always struck from a slightly contrarian point of view what interested me was why Czechoslovakia - if we leave aside Romania is a special case, although I’ll mention it as well - why Czechoslovakia came last.

There is an element of truth in the sense that the Czechs are reluctant to engage in conflict, that they are conflict-shy, as the Poles are never scared of telling you that the Czechs basically sit back and make any agreement in order to save themselves.

And there was an element whereby Havel was able to watch what was happening in Hungary, and in Poland, and then in East Germany. Remember, East Germany came before Czechoslovakia, and he was able to direct the revolution, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, so that it was an event, so that it was a spectacle, and he did it very, very well.

So Czechoslovakia at that moment, I think, had more affection, had more political influence than it might possibly have deserved. Because - and here, I agree with Lord Waldegrave Poland and Hungary are really the critical countries, and they’re the critical countries paradoxically because they were compelled to engage with the West.

Poland had run up a huge debt by the middle of the 1980s. By 1986, Poland was using 40% of its government budget in food subsidies alone. Now, if you’re looking at a country like Poland with its agricultural traditions, and it had to subsidise its food production to 40% meant that you had a system that was non-functioning.

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Hungary was also increasingly having a problem with government debt, such that Németh Miklós, who Lord Waldegrave just referred to, in 1984 travels to Bonn, and has a secret meeting with Helmut Kohl, and says, we’d like to consider membership at the IMF and the World Bank. This for me is the moment when Eastern Europe starts to crumble, when it can no longer be sustained in its internal system, as it were.

And it was that engagement with the West where the revolution really begins and happens.

It’s Hungary and it’s Poland. Again, the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria is absolutely critical. The fact that the East Germans run to Hungary - or indeed, of course, the embassy in Prague - that is telling you that this is the thin end of the wedge. And once Hungary and Poland started - Poland, of course, began in January 1989 - we knew that the writing was on the wall.

Just to finish up, there’s something which also struck me as odd. We invested a huge amount of money in the processes and the mechanisms of the Cold War. Unlike what the Americans did after the end of the Second World War with the Marshall Plan, where you had a symbiotic relationship with the need for security in Western Europe and the desire for the Americans to expand their markets, and that symbiotic relationship worked spectacularly well, there was absolutely no investment, thought, or planning into what might happen if the Berlin Wall came down.

I think that this is in retrospect - I mean, you know, hindsight is a great thing - this was a really critical error. Because the reason why we are facing such difficulty now is precisely because of the utterly chaotic transition from the planned economies to the market economies of Eastern Europe post-1989, as they didn’t have the tools and institutions to manage this at the speed that it happened.

We were all taken by shock by it, and we still remain to a degree in shock as a consequence of this and of another huge economic event, which was 2008. 1989 for me was the happiest, the most fulfilling, the most wonderful time of my life, very quickly blighted thereafter by the events in the former Yugoslavia.

That joy has been dulled somewhat over the past 30 years. But I have had a lovely time this year remembering 30 years on, just how excited we all were, whether we were in Bucharest, whether we were in Budapest, Sofia, Prague, East Germany, Berlin, Tirana, Warsaw. It was an absolutely marvellous event. Thank you.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you very much. Sir John Birch, as well as being head of Eastern Europe Department here was also, of course, ambassador to Hungary from 1989, and so right in the centre of the events that we’re talking about. Please, let’s hear more.

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SIR JOHN BIRCH: Well, thank you. When I went back to Hungary in September 1989, I went to call on Károly Grósz, the first Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party. And during our discussion, he said to me, Hungary is like a ship without a rudder.

We have lost control.

Now, hearing this from the horse’s mouth, of course, was a very welcome development. Because I had grown up during the years of, and spent my time in the office, during the years of the Cold War, and there were certain aspects of the Cold War in which the received wisdom, the conventional wisdom in the West, was that Communist parties never gave up power voluntarily; that we had come to accept the post-war development of the situation in Europe of a divided Europe, where Eastern Europe was within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and control; that the division of Germany was going to be a permanent feature well into the future; that Poland was always going to be a buffer state between Germany and Russia; and we had seen that when the chips were down, the Soviet Union was prepared to use force to maintain its control of Eastern Europe.

We had ’56, ’68, the imposition of martial law in Poland, and it was clear that perhaps some countries in central Europe, way into this century, might achieve a degree of independence similar to a neutrality, similar to Austria and to Sweden. But it was very, very far into the future.

Now, the picture changed completely in the mid-’80s, and the game changer was Gorbachev. And it’s important to remember that his openness and his reform was designed to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not to hasten it.

He signalled very early on during his presidency that the East Europeans were a burden on the Soviet Union, largely because of their economic weakness. But provided they remained within the Warsaw Pact, that they would have complete control over their own domestic arrangements and their own economies. That there would be no Soviet intervention, that there would be no rescue plan, that they could develop internally as they wished. In the words of Rodric Braithwaite, which are quoted in this volume, Gorbachev ‘lit the touch paper’ and then stood back.

There were other reasons for the changes in Eastern Europe. I mean, predominantly, it was economic failure. But politically and intellectually, the parties had become bankrupt. There was the glitter of the West, as an example. From what you’ve heard earlier, there was very much the oppressiveness, the fear in which people lived. You very rarely saw, those of you who walked on the streets of Eastern Europe in the 1980s, anyone who looked happy with life. It was only the children who laughed, or courting couples.

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And I’d like also to think that something of Western policy made these changes possible.

The Helsinki accords, the BBC, the role of dissidents, who got the Party on the run anyway in Poland and in Hungary, and the inability to travel. In Poland and throughout Eastern Europe until 1989, if you travelled abroad, you had to hand your passport back to the authorities when you returned. That was an illustration of the control that the party exercised.

Now, by the late 1980s, I don’t think Hungary or Poland were really communist countries any more. The Party was forced on to the back foot in Poland, particularly by Solidarity and by the Catholic Church, and in Hungary by the weakness of the Party and largely by dissidents, in fact. And so the Communist parties in Poland and Hungary were forced to establish Round Tables and to deal with the opposition. In fact, the Party in Poland and in Hungary, I think in 1989, wanted to retain some sort of power in free elections, but they negotiated their own funeral arrangements. The other East European leaders, Husák, Honecker, Zhivkov, Ceauşescu, thought that their brother Parties in Poland and Hungary were just crazy to be negotiating with the opposition.

By the beginning of 1989, as this book shows, Ambassadors were beginning to predict change. There were some words of caution. Change was seen as less likely in East Germany and in Romania. But it was clear that something was stirring. And when the changes came, as we’ve just heard, they were very sudden. The opening of the Hungarian border to Austria in August of 1989 was a very significant factor that led a lot of East Germans out into the West. And the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course. I’m not going to discuss that, because we have Charles Powell in the audience, Michael Burton, and I think Christopher Mallaby, who were all in the thick of it. And they can add some comments on that.

Mrs Thatcher initially was opposed to German reunification. To a large extent, that was a generational thing. And certainly, Gorbachev was opposed to German reunification. But it was a moment where the will of the German people predominated. And it was it was a period, as Misha has just said, of enormous euphoria in Eastern Europe. People just felt joyful at what was happening. The gruesome end of Ceauşescu in December of that year for a downtrodden people in Romania was an enormous, enormous event.

Now, I’d just like to stray for a moment into the 1950s, because Sarah had said that we might learn some lessons from this. I think that the new governments that took over, despite the euphoria, were obviously, by necessity, were very inexperienced. They were dissidents, journalists, writers, intellectuals, poets, museum curators. And they had a very difficult time in forming governments. I remember going to the headquarters of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, who’d won the election in 1990, and there were some champagne corks popping. But Peter Bod, who was to become the Minister of Industry, put his head in his hands and said, ‘My God, we’ve won the election and now we’ve got to run this bankrupt country’. They faced enormous difficulties. And because of their inexperience, a lot of bad people managed to take state assets, and the early years were very difficult for them.

We offered in the West, I think, probably too quickly, membership of NATO. We were rather bounced into it by the Americans through the Partnership for Peace, which was a precursor to NATO membership. I think that that really made the Russians fear that it was part of the 13

hostile encirclement. And I think that extension of NATO membership into the Baltic States was probably too soon, and a mistake.

The other thing that we offered was accession to the European Union. If you remember, both Conservative and Labour governments promoted membership of the European Union as a peaceful and prosperous future for these countries. Perhaps the irony of that sponsorship is not lost today. I think that Eastern Europe took too much of our attention, that we failed to see the future conflict in Yugoslavia, which took up so much of our attention in the 1990s.

But I’d just like to say - and I can say it because I was only on the field for the very last five minutes of this game - that this book is a remarkable tribute to the FCO Historians, who’ve chosen the documents, warts and all, I add. And it’s a great reflection on the diplomatic service during these years. As I say, I wasn’t really a player in it. It was a joyful and dramatic year, 1989. If you’re thinking about what you should give your mother for Christmas, I recommend this book.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. And finally, I think we’d love to hear from Gill Bennett, who for over 30 years has been helping the Foreign Office to understand and learn from the past.

GILL BENNETT: Thank you, Sarah. In the preface to this volume, we’ve been talking about Richard Smith writes that ‘The rapidly changing political landscape in 1989 posed new dilemmas for policymakers.’ Well, actually, it posed quite a lot of challenges to the Foreign Office Historians as well. And I’m actually going to talk to you about the impact of these events on our work here.

Misha Glenny talked about the excitement, and we certainly felt shock and excitement in autumn of 1989. Because quite coincidentally, on the 9th and 10th of November that year, we had convened the first ever meeting of a body now called the International Editors of Diplomatic Documents, which has met every other year ever since. But the first meeting was held here in the FCO. And overnight, between day one and day two, the Berlin Wall fell down. On the second day when we convened, everybody, hosts and guests, had been up watching the television, and so on. The West German delegation from the German series accused us of having set the whole thing up. Which we assured them we hadn’t, but that’s not too serious.

But as most of you here know, the two principal roles for the FCO Historians are firstly to produce these documents in the series Documents on British Policy Overseas, the official record of British foreign policy. Secondly, this amorphous job which is historical advice to 14

ministers and officials, which can be anything from a joke to go in a speech to a major piece of research that takes months or even years. And the events of autumn 1989 described in this volume affected us in a number of ways.

In terms of the volumes, we moved forward more quickly during the ’90s into a new venture which was to publish documents not already available to the general public, what we called from the closed period, i.e. in those days, less than 30 years old. The events of 1989 had changed our perspective so that we felt it was really important to push on with publishing documents from the late ’70s and ’80s which would illuminate how we got to that point, including a volume on Berlin, which encapsulates the crises of 1948, 1961, and then 1989, with Berlin as the kind of fault-line of the Cold War. But what I’m really going to talk about is the more amorphous side of this. The change for us came with the interaction with these countries who for so long had lived under the Soviet bloc in the Warsaw Pact. After the Communist regimes fell, these countries felt they wanted to get their history back. A number of people said that to me. They wanted to explore some of the things that they felt to be completely lost in the previous however many years since the end of the Second World War: since they came under Soviet rule. They wanted sometimes to look at difficult things, difficult for us to talk about as well as for them.

Poles, in particular, were getting very interested. They said: we lost our history, and we want to right wrongs. We want to put things right. This could lead us to some tricky exchanges. But on the whole, it was productive and collaborative. Countries felt free to ask questions and revive claims to Britain and other powers. This is the kind of thing historians do get drawn into. We are always dealing with conspiracy theories. They never go away, and they bounced out with a vengeance after 1989. Lord Waldegrave mentioned the Katyn Massacre. Of course, renewed interest had been aroused in that question by Gorbachev’s visit to Poland in 1988. But then, of course, with the admission, the acknowledgement of Soviet guilt in 1990, that aroused a whole other level of interest, which we did a lot of work on.

Actually during the 1990s, we had extremely good relations with the Russian foreign ministry, and indeed with Russian historians. In November 1990, my colleague Heather Yasamee went to Moscow with the head of our department to advise the Russians on the publication of diplomatic documents and to discuss other archival issues. We were also involved in a very worthwhile project, which was to try to return to the families of former British service personnel some personal correspondence, diaries, and photos. This material had formed part of a collection held in Moscow. They called it their Special Archive liberated from the Germans at the end of the Second World War. We were able to work very closely with the Russian authorities, and get this material back, and make sure that the families got these papers back. And that actually was a very worthwhile thing to do.

We exchanged documents on a number of issues during this period. And, of course, the project that I myself was involved in later in the ‘90s to investigate the Zinoviev letter was enormously facilitated by the Russian foreign ministry and by the then Russian Ambassador in this country. So the ’90s were a period in which we as historians interacted very closely with Russia.

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Poland is another one. As I mentioned, the Poles were very keen to revive a number of historical issues where they felt they had been given a very bad press, and in particular, to examine their intelligence contribution to Allied victory in the Second World War. This was to lead in 2000 to setting up the Anglo-Polish Historical Commission, which then published some reports. There were some very difficult moments in this process, where they always thought we should be able to find things that we couldn’t. They were in the habit when we had our meetings with the commission, when I said, well, ‘I’ve looked at this and this is what I’ve found’. And they would say, ‘that is not an acceptable answer’, which is one of those things that happens.

There were still, of course, a lot of people around who had been in the Second World War. I think in particular of the former Polish resistance fighter Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, who was a considerable wartime figure who felt very strongly about how Poland had been treated during the War, and, of course, at the end of the War, and very much let us know it.

There was also a lot of interaction with personalities in countries who had gone through revolutions in 1989. I’d like to mention just one in particular, and this was Pavel Seifter, who became the Czech ambassador in London from 1997 to 2003. But previously before 1968, he’d been a lecturer in history at Charles University. After the Soviet invasion, he lost his job and became a window cleaner. He had been a window cleaner for a long time. After 1980, he was a signatory of Charter 77, he was involved in Samizdat activities, and he took part in the creation of the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia.

After the revolution, he was head of Václav Havel’s Foreign Department, and then he came to the UK as Ambassador and very quickly got in touch with us with the FCO Historians, and he said, ‘Now I can do history again’. We were involved in projects together.

That was something we obviously would never, and could never have done in previous years. And he wanted to talk about British policy during the Cold War, and indeed, a number of the other countries who went through these events in 1989. They wanted to talk about it.

Sometimes they wanted to ask us difficult questions. But often they just wanted to talk about it and let us know that now they were back. It was a very interesting period, and exciting.

There’s also what I would call the intelligence angle of this. Because, of course, there’s always the suspicion that there are lots of things that we’re not telling anybody. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it isn’t. But quite often, the problem was that actually, the evidence did not exist. And this proved a very hard argument to sell to some countries. They assumed that we would have been keeping extensive records in the archives of the intelligence agencies which would answer a lot of questions they had not been able to ask during the Cold War. Unfortunately, trying to tell them that intelligence agencies are not actually there for the business of building an archive doesn’t go down very well, but that was my job. And they wanted to talk about this kind of thing.

But for us, for the Historians here, it meant we could talk more freely about some of the things that had happened during the Cold War. And as during the late ’80s and ’90s, legislation was passed putting the intelligence agencies on a statutory basis, you could 16

actually admit they existed, and indeed name their heads. You could also talk about things like information that had been acquired from defectors sometimes, and, of course, information from people like Oleg Gordievsky, who Mrs Thatcher called Mr Collins, insisted on calling him by his cover name.

I’d like to mention one last thing here, which was a very bizarre conference that I attended in the ’90s. It was organised by the CIA’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence. The title of the conference was ‘On the Frontlines of the Cold War - The Intelligence War in Berlin.’ It was held in the Teufelsberg, the old Allied listening post, which is a manmade mountain just outside Berlin. I have rarely experienced such a surreal event. Because, of course, now, there were obviously the representatives of the Quadripartite, the Four Powers who had administered Berlin for all those years, and representatives of other countries who previously, of course, we could not have visited, nor could we have talked to. It was very illuminating, shall I say, in a rather strange way. And it was full of Americans talking up to their shoulders and saying, ‘I don’t think we can say this’. But it was interesting. So I’m going to stop there.

But it’s not true to say that it’s only ministers, or, indeed, journalists, or, indeed, diplomats who felt the impact of the events described in this volume. It transformed our work in the FCO Historians as well. And largely, I would say, in a positive way. Thank you.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you very much. I will leave it to you, the audience, to decide which of our distinguished panellists are Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Spy. But now, I want to open the questioning up. I think I have got some colleagues with microphones roving around. I can see down at the front row, let’s start there.

JONATHAN EYAL: Jonathan Eyal from the Royal United Services Institute across the road. I enjoyed a great deal of what Sir John has said, but I would like to take issue with the subject that it was a mistake, I think as he said, that we invited these countries to join NATO and the European Union. I would say exactly the opposite.

JOHN BIRCH: Not the European Union JONATHAN EYAL: Sorry, that the European Union was somehow an irony that we are leaving while they are there, or that we had made a mistake in inviting them into NATO. I would - and the Locarno Room is probably an adequate place to have this kind of debate, since we have a history of ignoring the East Europeans - I would like to take much more the point of Misha Glenny. I have not seen the 1989 documents, but I’ve worked extensively on the Foreign Office documents for this particular region up to 1987. And I would say that it’s exactly as Misha says.

What is missing is any understanding about how much this collapse of Communism in Central Europe is changing us. I think that only came when the Berlin Wall fell. But until then, there was this assumption that we can continue as before. The idea that somehow, we could leave these countries, these independent countries hanging in the air with a united Germany on one side, and Russia on the other, and Poland in the middle without membership in the institutions in which we were members, was quite frankly, fanciful. If 17

anything, I would say the opposite. The criticism that I’d have of the Foreign Office people at the time is that they didn’t understand, or perhaps could not know, how much the collapse of Communism would change us, as opposed to changing the Central Europeans.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Sir John, would you like to respond?

SIR JOHN BIRCH: Yes. I partly agree. But the offer of membership of the European Union through accession agreements was a much more positive development. But we, in fact, we were the advocates of extending the European Union to the East European countries under both governments.

And the amount that West Germany did for East Germany, the level of support that we gave was because we were well aware of the difficulties that they would face. We promoted shock therapy and privatisation too quickly, because it led to a lot of hardship and to resources, state resources, getting into the wrong hands.

But on the NATO membership, I think I’m right in saying that most Ambassadors in the region regarded early NATO membership as something that we would never really be able to honour under Article V, and that it was provocative to the Russians, even though we got on with them pretty well in the 1990s, this fear of hostile encirclement.

And so I disagree with you about NATO, but I agree that our policy on the European Union was something very helpful for those countries.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. And I think Lord Waldegrave you had a point you wanted to come in on.

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: I just wanted to make a small point. I apologise it’s all anecdotes.

That’s probably what you want in a way, because the papers were interesting. But when I arrived in the Foreign Office, David Gore-Booth was Head of the Planning Staff. This is to comment on your point that people in the Foreign Office weren’t thinking of how it was going to affect us.

He had arranged for a piece of paper to be on my desk when I arrived. Kim Darroch was my private secretary: ‘Gore-Booth has left something for you’, and it was the Cavafy poem.

‘Those people were useful, weren’t they? There are no barbarians anymore’. That was in ’88. So there were people thinking of the profound effects this was going to have on us.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Who would like to ask the next question? Over on this side.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I’d perhaps like to direct this towards Misha, because you touched on this earlier. You mentioned the ecological impacts in that specific region. But if we take the case of Bulgaria and the Baltic states, there were ecological movements right at the core bringing about change. What sense of that did you get, I guess, across the whole panel whilst you were there, and also through the documents? Thank you.

MISHA GLENNY: Well, the one that I knew was Ecoglasnost in Bulgaria. This was interesting because Ecoglasnost brought together quite a diverse group of dissidents. From what they 18

identified - and I think this was quite smart - Bulgaria is one of those places where you had to be very careful about organising anything, because this was still the spirit of Zhivkov.

And by choosing the environment, they were able to promote a topic that was obviously for the common good. That was the thinking behind Ecoglasnost. And inasmuch that Bulgaria had its revolution, it’s thanks to the people around Ecoglasnost.

The other disaster area for the environment was Romania. But there, it was it was simply too difficult to organise without the most terrible retribution coming down on you very, very quickly. But increasingly in the thinking of the East Germans and the Czechs in particular, but also the Hungarians, Gabčikovo-Nagymaros the great dam that was built on the Slovak-Hungarian border, and which had a devastating impact on the environment around the Danube, was actually a critical moment in galvanising the Hungarian opposition from the late ’70s early ’80s onwards.

In that sense, I think that the East European opposition groups were aware and sensitive to broader social and political issues. And I’ll just finish on, because I didn’t finish the thought when I was talking about Hungary and Poland, why Czechoslovakia and East Germany lagged behind slightly.

It’s partly because in those countries which were economically, industrially, certainly more sophisticated, and economically notably more successful than Poland and Hungary - East Germany, of course, sort of were cheats to an extent, because they had the subsidies from West Germany, which were really, really significant.

But to a degree, the pact that the Party made after 1968 with the restoration of order [in Czechoslovakia], the social contract, whereby you keep your mouth shut and we will make sure that you have your cottage in the country and your Skoda to drive, actually worked.

There is a strong tradition of what would be called the petit bourgeoisie in Prague and Bratislava. The dissidents were actually more lonely as voices than one might have imagined. And I think that Czechoslovakia could have probably continued as it was for another five to 10 years if it weren’t for the impact of Hungary and Poland.

But in general, you had this growing social sense that this wasn’t just about political and human rights as understood through Helsinki, which I agree was a terribly important moment. It was also a realisation that the Party was managing the economy and society very, very poorly.

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: I just wanted to add to that from my political and ministerial role I was very close to a number of the people who were unofficially running intellectual contacts into, particularly perhaps Czechoslovakia, but elsewhere, people like Jessica Douglas Home and Roger Scruton.

A lot of these people were very interested in the environmental side. I’d been Environment Minister immediately before I came to the Foreign Office. Quite a lot of the lobbyists who had become rather my friends before were relevant to this subject. I think people like Tom Burke.

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And it was a very powerful thing that Bohemia, of course, that in here [the volume], I wrote about the industrial dereliction I see in Poland. And I also remember being very well briefed by somebody I think from inside the Office, actually, about heavy metal contamination in Bulgaria, in particular, which is still not cleared up, of course.

SARAH TAYLOR: We have a question over in the corner there. Do indicate to me in the meantime if anyone else has a question. I observe that the only women who have spoken so far are on the dais. So please and do you think about what questions you might like to ask from the floor as well.

ALEX MCKENNA: Alex McKenna of King’s College, London. Question for Lord Waldegrave. I note that in your remarks on Hungary, you mentioned Miklós Németh. But you didn’t mention anything about Viktor Orbán. Obviously, at the time, he was a more limited figure in the opposition than he would now have us believe. But to what extent do you think that you and the government were perhaps too optimistic about people like him and his ilk, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security by his chumminess with people like David Steel and his impeccable British education, at least a year’s worth of it?

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: I think we have to be careful about reading history backwards here. I think he’s mentioned in here. I think I mentioned him, probably, but along with a lot of other people. If I could give one example of a completely different country, which should perhaps be included in these papers, but, of course, can’t be really, because they were part of the Soviet Union - namely, the Ukraine.

When I met the dissidents in the Ukraine - this all turns up, incidentally, in Rodric Braithwaite’s memoirs - we met a whole lot of dissidents in a forest Dacha place. And an incredible amount of vodka was drunk, and they ranged - I remember writing afterwards in a note - from extreme free market characters to romantic poets. And I knew that half of them were KGB agents, anyway.

In Czechoslovakia, I remember meeting [Václav] Klaus and rather patronisingly saying to him, now, when you have the first elections, try and make cross-party agreements about your welfare spend so that you don’t all compete with each other. ‘Welfare spend’, he said, ‘well, we don’t have any of that nonsense here’.

But one didn’t necessarily think that these were going to be the people who were going to inherit. Nor did one think that one was giving them any particular favour. One was conscious of the fact that they were people who had done everything out of books, and they faced the dilemma. Of course, some of the books were silly books, and some of them weren’t so silly books.

There was another great man in England, Leszek Kołakowski. We were fellows of the same college. And if I relied on anybody outside the Foreign Office to steer me in the direction of people across Eastern Europe who were probably the right people, it might have been Leszek actually.

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[Krzysztof] Skubiszewski for example, who my first meeting with him he was wearing his mallard tie - he’d been a visiting fellow at All Souls which has a tie with a mallard on it. And it was he, I think, who said to me - just picking up the point that Gill said about having lost their history - he came to see me in the Foreign Office, when I was down at the other end [of the building], because this end was being refurbished, and there was the opening of Parliament going on, horses, and jangling, and bands, and things.

And it was perfectly clear he wasn’t paying any attention to me. He wanted to go and watch the parade. He did watch the parade, and he said, the Communists robbed us of our rituals, which is such a nice thing to say.

SIR JOHN BIRCH: Just on the question of Orbán, I knew Orbán in the late ’80s. What he did after he’d come back from Pembroke College prematurely, actually - he left well before he was originally meant to (and that, of course, was financed by George Soros, that stay in Pembroke) - was that he supercharged the Hungarian opposition.

The Hungarian opposition had been intellectually quite interesting, but politically relatively ineffective, partly because the Hungarians were concerned largely about economic problems rather than political problems. Politically and socially, life was quite easy in Hungary, certainly relative to elsewhere.

Orbán comes in like an express train and starts mobilising young people from disparate parts of the nascent Hungarian political environment. And he is, in my opinion, in that period, nothing but a positive force, who with Fidesz, really hastened the demise of the regime in Hungary.

What happened subsequently is later on, and he becomes a politician like anyone else. Like many politicians, he’s an opportunist, and he sees his opportunity to change his ideology in order to secure power. But that doesn’t mean that his role in the late ’80s or early ’90s should be diminished. And finally, I think it’s a wonderful irony now that both the Romanian and Hungarian prime ministers are called Orbán.

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: Just one further point. There’s a long minute by me in here about my visit to Hungary in July of ’89, where I’m debating whether Pozsgay should be taken seriously or not, whether he passes that criterion to be the real thing or not. That’s where Orbán comes in. I say, Fidesz and those people, they’re the real thing. They’re genuine.

Now, we have to try and test these other people who suddenly all say they’re social democrats whether they’re really social democrats. We don’t need to worry about him, because he’s obviously genuine.

SARAH TAYLOR: One on the aisle here, and then we’ll go to the back. Thank you.

DAVID COLVIN: Thank you. There’s one set of documents which doesn’t appear in this volume, which could never indeed actually appear. And this was the material of the spy Gordievsky when he was debriefed. I think a lot of that was very interesting in terms of what was going to happen later in East and Central Europe. And, of course, it’s not supposed to be mentioned, but it certainly affected my way of thinking of this. When I went to Hungary 21

in 1985 and observed not this crucial period, but leading up to that. And one other thing, the explosion of the power station in Chernobyl also had a considerable effect on the people I talked to, that this was further proof that such were needed, for the whole Soviet system was in its death agonies.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Should we take the question here?

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I would like to come back to the question where we started, regarding, was it a mistake to incorporate East European countries into NATO, and not putting them only into the EU? What was the position of the dissidents and new governments coming into power after the fall of the Soviet control of Eastern Europe on this point, which wanted to get rid of Soviet domination, but probably had or should have had an idea how to handle this problem as well? And the response at that time by the British government regarding these ideas, and in hindsight, whether there would have really been some kind of options which have given an alternative.

SARAH TAYLOR: So if I understand correctly - but do correct me - the question is, how did the leaders in those countries who were joining NATO feel about the plans at the time, the implications, and what other opportunities were available to them? Is that correct?

AUDIENCE: Yes, but maybe going closer back to 1989. So the first people coming into office, the poets, the museum directors, which we just mentioned. Had they ideas about it, and how was it responded to from the West?

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you, sir. The very early thoughts about how these new emerging countries might form their collective security, perhaps, newly aligned to the West. Any reflections? Sir John.

SIR JOHN BIRCH: Well, there was a feeling amongst some of the new leadership that having left Comecon and the Warsaw Pact - did they then immediately want to join other alliances, which they felt hadn’t served them very well.

The thing about NATO was that it really didn’t require anything more than a signature on a piece of paper. The accession to the European Union meant that there had to be a fundamental change in their economies, in their corruption laws, in their banking laws, so that it was a much more difficult and time-consuming process.

But I can’t think of any East European leader who having considered it, wasn’t in favour of joining both NATO and the European Union. You’re going to correct me, are you, Jonathan [Eyal]?

SARAH TAYLOR: Not straightaway. I’m not going to let him.

[LAUGHTER]

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I have a lady here who would like to make a comment, and I’ll go to the front, and then I’ve got a couple of people behind.

JANET GUNN: My name’s Janet Gunn. In those days, I was a research analyst working unusually in succession on both the Soviet Union and on Central and Eastern Europe. Today, I have a very different focus because I’m a reviewer of the archives before they go to the National Archives.

I’ve been through all the ’80s files of Central and Eastern European Department and Soviet Department, and I’m currently on 1991, so I’m a bit ahead of this meeting. But I’ve read it all. And it’s very clear that one of the first problems that arose for those countries and in their new governments was how to be secure. Most of them were very clear that Russia, Soviet Union, whatever you like to call it, was a threat, and would be a threat in the future again, unless they secured some form of collective defence. And they stuck with this line.

We were very hesitant because Mrs Thatcher was getting on well with Gorbachev. She knew that there was opposition to what he was doing in reforming Russia - I’m sorry - in the Soviet Union. And there was a lot of concern that if we helped the Central Europeans, as we now call them, East Europeans, to move faster, that this might cause a backlash in Moscow that would turf Gorbachev out of power, and everything might go very, very pear-shaped, indeed. And so we had a dilemma.

But the people leading those countries were pretty clear what they wanted. It was NATO. And we talked about WEU, and we talked about partnerships, and associations, and this, that, and the other, but they had very clear ideas. As for just signing this paper to join NATO, I don’t think it was quite as simple as that. They worked very hard to reform their armed forces.

SARAH TAYLOR: Fascinating. Thank you very much.

GILL BENNETT: Sarah, can I just-SARAH TAYLOR: Please do, and then I’ll take some more questions.

GILL BENNETT: On this question of NATO, I just wanted to mention, I mentioned earlier the Anglo-Polish Historical Commission, which was set up following a request from the Prime Minister of Poland to our then Prime Minister Tony Blair.

We Historians have always been rather reluctant to enter into formal joint commissions, because it always ends up with us doing all the work, we used to feel, and nobody else doing much. However, the word came from No. 10 very clearly, that this is to do with Poland wanting to join NATO and they regard this as part of the establishment of their status. And said that we should say more about their contribution to earlier military activities so it would reinforce their application. So we were told quite firmly that we were doing it.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. I’m going to take one from the front, because I know you wanted to respond on NATO. 23

JONATHAN EYAL: I don’t wish to belabour the point. I think Janet Gunn answered the question about it being a walkover, joining NATO just signing a piece of paper. No one in the region would accept that it was that. But I do want to answer the question from our colleague here about what was else on offer.

What was on offer was our common European home by Mikhail Gorbachev or a Security Council for Europe, another proposal put by the French and the Russians. In essence, the options facing us were very simple. Either a sort of Little Entente arrangement run by Poland, Romania, and a few of the Baltic states, precisely the stuff that got us into the Second World War, or their collective defence. Which one would you choose?

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. I’ll go behind on the NATO point, if that’s OK. And then I’m coming over to you.

NIGEL THORPE: Thank you. Nigel Thorpe. I was head of Central European Department from 1992 to 1996, and in that role, I travelled all the time in the former Soviet satellites. And I can only endorse what Janet Gunn has said in that everywhere I went, I encountered concern for security from Russia, profound mistrust of Russia’s long-term intentions.

All right, in 1992, Russia was on its knees. But nobody thought that was going to last. And they wanted the long-term security, which in fact, British ministers and other Western ministers were promising them, just as they were promising them prosperity to be delivered by integration into the major Western institutions. That was our policy, that was our approach, and that’s actually what happened.

There was a very vigorous debate in this office about NATO accession. I, as head of Central European Department, proposed it and encountered strong opposition from the defence establishment in the office. But there was a vigorous debate. But I think in the end, the Americans decided anyway. So thank you.

SARAH TAYLOR: That never happens these days.

[LAUGHTER] JOHN TOLSON: John Tolson, Ministry of Defence. Without labouring the point about NATO accession, it certainly didn’t feel as if it was particularly easy. Because within NATO, especially insofar as the defence establishments of some member states were concerned, there was a lot of resistance to having our new chums in. Consequently, the process took quite a while.

The Poles, Czechs and Hungarians were the first. And if I’m correct, accession didn’t take place formally until 1998. Now, part of the reason for that was something I think has been alluded to before today. There were difficulties because some ‘undesirables’ were in key positions. There was a particular concern about the Polish intelligence community. It was not exactly riddled, but was still controlled by people who had been fairly senior in the previous regime. And the NATO Office of Security was determined to ensure that this was sorted out before formal accession.

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So that was how it seemed to be on the ground. It worked. And by the time the process was complete the intelligence organisations at least were well prepared as well as keen to join, and it has really worked very well since then. Thank you.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Could I ask the microphone just be passed to the chap in front of you? That’s perfect.

MAREK BIČAN: My name is Marek Bičan I am a student of King’s College London, and I am from the Czech Republic. I have a comment and a question. The gentleman did not ask about the policies in the ’90s, but about the position of dissidents in the late ’80s, as far as I understand it correctly. And in Czechoslovakia, which is the case about which I will be talking, because I am familiar with that, there was no immediate consensus that Czechoslovakia will join NATO. And it was very, like, quite the opposite, actually.

Because one of the very prominent dissidents was called Jiří Hájek and he was the Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Prague Spring in 1968. He criticised the occupation in the UN Security Council and he was later sacked and expelled from the Communist Party. He was by far not alone in believing in the end of bipolar world. He wanted the Warsaw Pact and NATO to be disbanded, and to build a collective security within the OSCE back then, and CSCE framework. So there was this opinion and Václav Havel at the very beginning of his presidency supported this. And our Minister of Foreign Affairs Jiří Dienstbier, he was a former journalist interested in foreign affairs, and he also supported this. But then there was Sasha Vondra, who became the Minister of Defence, and the young dissidents were supportive of NATO membership, so it was slightly more complex. Interestingly, Warsaw Pact was then in early ’90s disbanded in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague.

When there was a speech of Václav Havel in Polish Parliament, the Polish MPs were quite frightened of the idea that the Warsaw Pact should be disbanded, because there were ideas that collective security could be based on the Warsaw Pact, but with a limited role for the Russians, which obviously didn’t work at the end. So I just wanted to explain a bit, at least the Czech perspective.

And my comment - the last time during which Britain operated with free Central Europe and Eastern Europe was during the inter-war period and virtually all of the states misbehaved either towards their minorities living on their territory or towards the neighbours. Were there are any concerns on the British side in the late ’80s and ’90s about the problems that might occur between Slovaks and Hungarians, Hungarians and Romanians, and these historical problems between the nations? So thank you, and sorry for a lengthy introduction of my question.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. If anyone on the panel would like to pick up that final point.

MISHA GLENNY: I could pick up on the last point.

SARAH TAYLOR: Yes, Misha first. Thank you.

MISHA GLENNY: So yes, there were concerns, in particular, in terms of the relationship between Hungary and Romania, but also to a lesser extent with Slovakia.

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What I had noticed in the 1980s amongst people who were not Communists in Hungary, but who were not fully active in the dissident movement - these were friends and contacts I’d made - is there was still a very strong sense that [the Treaty of] Trianon was a betrayal, and that [INAUDIBLE] was caution. And at some point, they would be getting it back.

These were romantic nationalist notions, which had no real basis in political reality at the time. But with Transylvania, there was, as we know, a real potential for violence, and that actually occurred. What was really fascinating was that the Hungarians and the Romanians were already aware of how things were playing out in Yugoslavia, and they had the political and diplomatic intelligence to bring the whole thing in Transylvania to a halt before it got out of hand. So these were concerns. I don’t think that the West was quite aware of these concerns.

For example, I don’t think there was an assumption that Czechoslovakia would break up, nor the sort of depth of the kind of Machiavellian cynicism of both Klaus and [INAUDIBLE] [probably Vladimír Mečiar] on either side of that divide. But certainly, this is an issue which has not gone away today, and I think we’re now more aware of than we were at the time.

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: And perhaps just to add two other issues which were relatively high on the agenda - not quite the same. One was, of course, the Polish-German border.

And the other was the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, which was a continuing theme and turns up in these papers regularly.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. I’ve got three people on my list. Now, four and five. I will take those as the last, if that’s OK, mindful as I am that Foreign Office warm white wine only gets warmer.

[LAUGHTER] COLIN MUNRO: Thank you very much. A couple of points from the East German perspective. As the revolution unfolded, beginning to really gain momentum, after that crucial moment, the opening of the Hungarian border to Austria - and I’m very glad that the speakers from the panel have mentioned how important that is - many Austrians where I now live seem hardly aware of it, I have to say.

Now, the East German revolution was made initially by people who wanted to turn that country into a sort of East German Sweden, so left of social democracy, and all the rest of it.

That revolutionary phase, it came to an end with the fall of the Wall. And ten days later, Mrs Thatcher was being horrified by the slogans that were appearing on the streets of Leipzig and everywhere, saying, ‘We are not the people. We are one people’. And she was reacting a little bit - this is ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer’ and the Führer is Helmut Kohl, and I can’t really put up with that.

Now, then there was the issue of what was going to happen to East Germany? Is it going to become part of NATO? And what we were hearing, as I recall, was that the Poles, and the Hungarians, and the Czechs, and so on were saying, yes, certainly. We want the whole of Germany to be in NATO, because we do not want an enlarged, powerful Germany swinging 26

between East and West like happened in the past. And the united Germany should be subjected to the disciplines of NATO. The European Security Council, this was something that the Russians pushed very strongly in the OSCE, which was my task at the time. I remember at a conference in Brussels, actually, where [Alexey] Arbatov junior [son of Georgy] came up to me in the coffee break and said, we want a European Security Council with three members.

So I said, well, I can work out what the first two should be. It’ll be the United States and Russia. But who on Earth is going to be the third member? The European Union. And so I said, well, I think that has a certain element of futurology about it.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that there was a French initiative called the Balladur Plan initially, which we thought was to do with minorities and frontiers. And there was a strong feeling in the Office that this was a plot to slow down enlargement.

The idea was that these countries had to sort out their minority and frontier plans before they joined either the EU or NATO and we thought this was a way to postpone membership of these organisations. And I have to pay tribute to Douglas Hurd. He said, well, we’ll support this plan, provided it is a means to speed up European integration.

But by that time, the French were so fixed on having grand conferences and so on that we really did make some progress, particularly in the case of Hungarian minorities - not so in the Baltic states, because the Russians saw anything that was good for the EU or certainly good for NATO as a zero-sum game. And it’s rather sad that the ideas of good neighbourly relations are not so prevalent today between, shall we say, the Hungarians and the Romanians.

SARAH TAYLOR: Perhaps you could pass the microphone just to the lady in front of you.

Thanks very much.

NICOLA DI LUZIO: Thank you. Nicola Di Luzio, FCO. Sorry to pivot a bit - and this is not the most original of questions. But given your wealth of experience, I can’t help asking it. As you think back on 1989, what lessons could you draw for today, firstly in relation to prodemocracy movements fighting against authoritarian regimes around the world, and secondly, looking ahead to next week for the future of NATO? SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Who’s brave enough to have a go at that?

JOHN BIRCH: I would be.

SARAH TAYLOR: Fantastic.

SIR JOHN BIRCH: I think that we were taken by surprise by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the great changes in Eastern Europe. And we always have to be looking, have a 360degree outlook on life. And if you’re talking about China, I know that they worry greatly about what is happening and what happened to the Soviet Union.

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So I think that that ability to foresee crises and to see developments is terribly important.

We became almost so fixated on what was happening in Europe, in Eastern Europe because of the glamour, the excitement, the euphoria, that we forgot about Yugoslavia. And I think we need to think now about China as well.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. I’m going to ask a few more panellists, and I’ll come back to the audience. Just I request to keep your comments brief. Thank you.

MISHA GLENNY: Just briefly on the last question, on the lessons learned, by the time we joined in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we had all the information from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as to what happens when institutions collapse, when governments are suddenly broke, and when existing structures are swept away.

This was this was how organised crime, the oligarchs, the stripping of state assets took place. And yet when it came to 2003, the United States, primarily made the decision to dismantle the Ba’ath Party. And the result has been the chaos ever since.

So my fear is that even when we have clear lessons about how you engage with revolutionary situations, we’ve forgotten them, even when they’re still staring us in the face.

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Gill.

GILL BENNETT: One thing that being an official historian of foreign policy teaches you is that it’s never as simple as it looks, and that ministers are always thinking about a great many things at once. And that you always have to look at what’s going on elsewhere in the world at the time.

And there were a lot of other things going on. I’m not saying this is an excuse but you do have to remember that after all, we did have Tiananmen Square, so there was a lot of focus on China in 1989. And there was South Africa, as William was talking about. There were a lot of other things.

And historically, although things are never quite the same, and they never repeat exactly, there is a pattern that urgent events take people’s eyes off perhaps what in hindsight you think they should be looking at more closely. And that we can never look at just Eastern Europe on its own. We always have to look at the whole world.

My very first boss in this building - Sarah kindly said 30 years - more than 40 years ago was the late Professor W. N. Medlicott, who used to say to me while I was writing on any given historical issue, what’s going on in the rest of the world? And it’s a lesson I’m afraid we have to keep repeating now.

WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE: I strongly agree with that, and the danger of a thematic book like this is - there was Hong Kong. I haven’t mentioned Hong Kong. There were crucial things going on in Hong Kong at the time. There was real movement in the Middle East.

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I suffered - I don’t want to remind people of my little troubles - but as I spent three or four years being cross-examined by Lord Justice Scott, his view was that I was doing nothing at all through this period, except examining bits of paper about whether certain bits of tubing or not were for weapons or not. And I tried this out on him once or twice, that there were other things going on, but it cut no ice at all. And that’s how judges think. That’s why you shouldn’t involve judges too much in foreign policy. But of course the events were all interrelated. Perhaps not Hong Kong, but that was a different origin. But what was happening in South Africa was related to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to some extent. What was happening in the Middle East was. So we were trying to think holistically about this.

I just wanted to make one point on NATO. Because in my second childhood, I’ve become rather French about me. And that was why I quoted David Gore-Booth leaving me the Cavafy poem, because NATO had an absolutely clear objective. We won’t remind ourselves of that cynical Foreign Office view about keeping the Americans in, and the Russians out, and the Germans down. I can’t remember who said that. But it had a clear mission, anyway, which was that there was an expansionist power to the East, which very recently and still in the early ’80s, with those frightful old men in charge, was very, very dangerous, and it was absolutely clear doctrine what it was meant to do.

But then it sort of ended up in Afghanistan or somewhere. I don’t really blame the President of France - brain dead is a bit strong [this refers to a recent comment on NATO of President Macron]- but NATO’s clear purpose was to with one lot of barbarians - and they were barbarians - and doing that very effectively. It’s becoming much more difficult to understand quite what its doctrine is supposed to be now. But then, that’s just because I’m getting old, I supposed. When I had a Kim Darroch to explain it all to me, it was much simpler.

[LAUGHTER] SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. And I have a question at the front, and then one at the back.

We’ll take them straight after each other, if that’s OK. ANDREW NOBLE: Thank you. Andrew Noble. I’m just young enough still to be on the FCO payroll, but old enough to have done Romania and Germany posting before the Wall came down. And we’re looking at history at the heart of diplomacy [the slogan on the FCO Historians’ banner]. I think one of the important things especially our younger members of staff need to realise is how massive all of what we’re talking about was in terms of the preoccupations of the Foreign Office. It was one of the impossible goals. And I think one of the lessons of this bit of history is that, actually, pursuing the impossible is about what diplomacy is about. And with the fall of apartheid, with peace in Northern Ireland, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have, I think, very good examples of why it’s worth going for the impossible.

The other question I wanted to ask, since we have such talent in front of us and as I’m now ambassador in Bucharest, I’m still very interested in drawing the lessons of this bit of history. Have we overdone the normalisation? There in the EU, there in NATO, it’s all done.

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Have we gone too far from that absolute focus on what was happening in Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? Do we now under-do it?

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Hold that thought. We’ll take one from the back, and then we’ll come back to our panel.

MILES BASSETT: Oh, hello. My name’s Miles. I’m from King’s College. I was just wondering, one of the overlooked events in this period was the 1991 coup attempt in Moscow. I was just wondering what was, if any, the British response should that attempt at a coup have been successful? And lastly, how much of a threat do you think modern Russia is today?

SARAH TAYLOR: Thank you. Anyone from the panel like to pick up on the points made, either by Andrew on have we overdone normalisation or the question about the coup, and where we go from there?

MISHA GLENNY: A very tiny bit on the coup, which is peripheral, and that’s the effect of the coup on what was going on in Yugoslavia at the time because before the coup, its outcome had become clear. Slobodan Milošević publicly supported the coup and basically, that was the beginning of the end of Milošević. Because of the fact that whereas [Franjo] Tudjman had understood that slow cultivation of Germany and Austria was absolutely critical to his success, Milošević at that moment put all of his eggs in the Russian basket. And before long, the basket had fallen apart, and the eggs had fallen out.

SARAH TAYLOR: You’re going to have to grill them over wine on the normalisation question, I think. Thank you. I think that concludes our panel. I want to thank our panellists in the traditional way, but I’d also like to thank our audience, because what an extraordinary, rich set of contributions and questions we’ve had from you as well. So thank you very much, indeed, everybody.

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Appendix: 1989 timeline 12 January 1989

15 January 1989

18 January 1989

February 1989 6 February 1989

15 March 1989 4 April 1989

22 April 1989

25 April 1989

May 1989

Hungarian parliament adopts a ‘democracy package’.

This includes trade union pluralism; freedom of association, assembly, and the press; a new electoral law; and a radical revision of the constitution.

After 6 days of protests, Czech police use water cannon to disperse demonstrators led by Václav Havel, leader of Charter 77. Czech press agency CTK reports that the demonstrators are ‘undermining the incipient process of democratisation’. Havel and 400 other protestors are arrested.

Havel is sentenced to 8 months’ in prison.

After turbulent meetings of the Plenary Session of the United Workers’ Party, First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski succeeds in getting party backing for formal negotiations with Solidarity leaders for its re-legalisation.

Hungarian Communists renounce ‘leading role’ and propose multi-party-political system.

Communist authorities begin talks with Lech Wałęsa and other leaders of the banned Solidarity movement on power-sharing arrangement.

Mass demonstrations on Hungary’s National Day. Round Table talks conclude with landmark deal on partially free elections. Both sides agree to the establishment of a bicameral legislature, the National Assembly comprising the Senate and the Sejm. The Presidency is given more powers.

Solidarity is legalised again.

Talks between democratic parties and government begin. The talks include the Communists (MSzMP) and the newly emerging independent political forces Fidesz, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz), the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), the Independent Smallholders’ Party, the Hungarian People’s Party, the Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Society, and the Democratic Trade Union of Scientific Workers. Later on, Democratic Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) are also included.

Soviet troops begin withdrawal from Eastern Europe.

Campaign against ethnic Turks. Over 300,000 are expelled by summer 1989.

Czech authorities are persuaded to release Havel.

Over the summer anti-government demonstrations continue.

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May 1989 4 May 1989 25 May 1989

4 June 1989

16 June 1989

24 June 1989

7 July 1989

13-19 July 1989

18 July 1989

August 1989 15 August 1989

17 August 1989

Baltic Republics (Latvia, Lithuania) follow Estonia and declare themselves to be sovereign.

Hungarian forces begin dismantling 240kms border fence with Austria.

The Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies 2-week session.

(Some delegates voice unprecedented criticism of Gorbachev, the Soviet communist party and the KGB.) Gorbachev is elected the Supreme Soviet’s President; Nikolai Ryzhkov as is elected Prime Minister.

Solidarity overwhelmingly wins elections, taking all eligible seats (161) in the Sejm (the United Workers Party & their allies have 65 per cent of Sejm seats [294]), and 99 out of 100 available seats in the (freely elected) Senate.

250,000 Hungarians attend the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister executed for his role in the 1956 anti- Soviet uprising. Mounting pressure on the government to allow free elections.

The Hungarian Communist Party’s Central Committee is reformed. A 4-member presidium is set up headed by reform advocate Rezső Nyers, who becomes party chairman. The other presidium members are Party General Secretary Károly Grósz, Premier Miklós Németh and Minister of State Imre Pozsgay.

Warsaw Pact annual meeting in Bucharest. Gorbachev suggests emulating Soviet reform ideas, and calls for ‘independent solutions to national problems’. The meeting’s final communiqué states there are ‘no universal models of socialism’. Gorbachev announces that each country can take its own path to socialism.

President Bush European tour. Visits Poland (and Hungary) and promises financial aid from the USA and World Bank. At G-7 annual meeting in Paris [July 14] G-7 members also agree to provide aid to Hungary and Poland.

Joint session of the Polish national assembly elects First Secretary Jaruzelski as President of a democratic government.

Czesław Kiszczak due to be premier but cannot form a coalition.

First GDR refugees leave Soviet bloc via Hungary.

Two long-time coalition partners of the Polish communist party, the United People’s Party (ZSL) and the Democratic Party (SD), break their alliance with the PZPR and announced their support for Solidarity.

President Gorbachev issues a publication: ‘the nationalities policy of the Party under modern conditions.’

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19 August 1989

The non-communist Tadeusz Mazowiecki is nominated as Prime Minister, and confirmed by Parliament on 24 August.

10 September 1989

Hungary opens border with Austria to allow the departure of East German refugees. In the next 36 hours, an estimated 10,500 East Germans cross Hungary’s border into Austria.

Overall, more than 30,000 eventually reach the West in the first big exodus of East Germans since the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.

12 September 1989

Solidarity-led government takes power in Poland.

The 23-member cabinet has 11 Solidarity members, 11 members from the United Workers Party and its allies and one independent member.

Hungarian Round Table talks conclude, with signature of agreement on six draft laws that covered an overhaul of the Constitution, establishment of a Constitutional Court, the functioning and management of political parties, multiparty elections for National Assembly deputies, the penal code and the law on penal procedures. Separation of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party from the state apparatus. Half the deputies to be elected on proportional basis, half appointed on the majoritarian system.

In a major speech, Gorbachev complains about ‘separatist nationalism’. Despite this, the local governments of Lithuania and Estonia pass legislation to introduce free market policies.

Over 5,500 East Germans had taken refuge in West Germany’s embassy in Prague, requesting to emigrate to the West. The East German authorities agreed that East Germans at Prague embassy could go by train to the West, a decision which precipitates mass flight of approximately 10,000 East Germans from Dresden, boarding trains coming from Prague en route to the West. Clashes with East German police in Dresden.

18 September 1989

19 September 1989

30 September 1989

October 1989 7 October 1989

9 October 1989

Demonstrations in Bulgaria on environmental issues. There are also demands for political reform.

East Germany’s 40th anniversary overshadowed by emigration crisis, and massive street demonstrations in East German larger cities. Gorbachev visits GDR, and encourages reform and independence. Gorbachev tells his East German host, President Erich Honecker: ‘Life punishes those who delay’.

After an extraordinary Hungarian Socialist Workers Party Congress, the party disbands, and is reformed as the Hungarian Socialist Party. It forms a 24-member presidium and elects reformer Rezső Nyers as President.

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16-20 October 1989

18 October 1989

23 October 1989

28 October 1989

November 1989 3 November 1989

9 November 1989

10 November 1989

16 November 1989

16 November 1989 17 November 1989

17 November 1989 19 November 1989 20/21 November 1989

23 November 1989

Hungarian National Assembly adopts legislation providing for multi-party parliamentary elections, and a direct presidential election; furthermore, the assembly approves laws codifies civil and human rights, and form separate executive, legislative and judicial entities. Constitutional reference to the communist party’s leading role is deleted.

Honecker resigns, replaced by Egon Krenz, who promises reform. Protests continue in Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin, and are met with police violence.

At a rally celebrating the 33rd anniversary of the 1956 uprising, Hungarian President Mátyás Szűrös declares ‘the free Republic of Hungary’ replacing the People’s Republic of Hungary.

100,000 protestors in Prague are met by riot police. 355 arrests.

Ceauşescu re-elected as leader of the Romanian Communist Party.

More than 4,000 Bulgarians join Eco-glasnost march in Sofia in the first unofficial public protest for 40 years.

Demonstrations are suppressed.

East Germany opens Berlin Wall in a desperate bid to placate people. Reform Communist Hans Modrow is appointed prime minister days later.

President Todor Zhivkov, Eastern Europe’s longest-serving leader, resigns as Communist Party chief and head of state. He is replaced by Petar Mladenov. Immediate repeal of restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly.

Announcement of arrest and exile of local Hungarian Calvinist minister, László Tőkés, for sermons criticising the government. Riots in Timisoara. Protests continue for five days.

National referendum decides Hungary’s president should be elected by parliament, not by popular vote Riot police suppress student demonstration in Prague. This sparks a series of mass street demonstrations.

Meeting of opposition leaders, including Havel.

Mass demonstrations in Bulgaria, and formation of noncommunist movements.

In Czechoslovakia, the opposition unites with the Civic Forum.

Demonstrations culminate with more than 200,000 people in Wenceslas Square, cheering Roman Catholic Primate Cardinal František Tomášek who declares: ‘We cannot wait any more’.

Former leader Alexander Dubček addresses rally in Bratislava in his first political speech since he was ousted in 1968. The Czechoslovak Army says it will defend socialism.

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24 November 1989

27 November 1989 28 November 1989

29 November 1989

7 December 1989

10 December 1989 11 December 1989

15 December 1989 17 December 1989

18 December 1989 20 December 1989 20 December 1989

21 December 1989

Dubček tells more than 300,000 people in Prague his ideal of ‘socialism with a human face’ is still alive in the minds of the younger generation. After a day-long crisis session Communist Party leader Miloš Jakeš steps down. Entire Presidium of the Communist Party, including President Gustav Husák, resigns.

(Husák remains President until 10 December.)

Two-hour general strike across the country.

Power-sharing discussions between new communist leader, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec with Civic Forum leaders.

Czechoslovak communist party announces it will relinquish power and dismantle the one-party state.

Czech parliament removes constitutional clause on the communist party’s ‘leading role’ in government.

Nine opposition movements untied as Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). Demands for further reform, including the removal of the constitutionally mandated leading role of the Bulgarian communist party.

Marián Čalfa becomes Czechoslovak premier and forms a cabinet of 10 communists and 11 non-communists.

Mladenov announces the future termination of the communist party’s monopoly of power, and planned multi-party elections in 1990 Vigil in support of László Tőkés turns into major demonstration.

Army intervenes and fires on the protestors. Initial number of casualties estimated to run to several thousand, but eventually revised to 122 fatalities. On Elena Ceauşescu’s orders, 4 bodies are transported to Bucharest and cremated, to avoid identification.

Peaceful demonstrations by industrial workers in Timisoara, escalate into massive street protests.

Timisoara is declared a free city. Romanians learn the number of fatalities from Western radio broadcasts.

On his return from state visit to Iran, Ceauşescu makes a televised address in which he dismisses the demonstrations as the work of ‘fascists and hooligan elements’, inspired by Hungarian irredentism.

Ceauşescu is booed by a crowd outside the Romanian Communist party HQ in Bucharest, and interrupted by protest shout ‘We are not hooligans’. Tumult in the crowd as others fear action by the security forces and try and flee; live television and radio broadcast of the event is interrupted.

Groups in the crowd are not placated by Ceauşescu’s announcement of salary and pension increases. Student and youth protests at University Square are fired on by the 35

22 December 1989

25 December 1989

27 December 1989

28 December 1989

Securitate and police, and a number are killed. Demonstrations and civil unrest spread through the country.

An official communique on the demonstration, broadcast on television, dismisses the protestors as ‘hooligans’, ‘fascists’ and ‘foreign agents’.

Parallel announcement of apparent suicide of Defence Minister Vasile Milea, accused of being a traitor.

Senior army officers order their units in front of the Central Committee building to withdraw.

Revolt by Romanian military rank and file, supported by demonstrators, who converge from all parts of the city.

Rioters storm Central Committee HQ. Despite trying to flee via helicopter, Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena are captured.

After a perfunctory trial, Nicolae Ceauşescu is executed. First government of National Salvation Front (NSF) formed, under Ion Iliescu.

Elections planned for April 1990.

The government and 9 opposition groups in Bulgaria agree to abolish the communist party’s leading role, to hold free elections, to expel President Zhivkov from the Communist party and to appoint Petar Mladenov as party leader.

Czechoslovak Federal Assembly elects Václav Havel as President of Czechoslovakia and Alexander Dubček as speaker of Parliament.

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gov.uk/fco