Nick Thorpe on The Fall of Communism

Your first book is Mark Frankland’s The Patriots’ Revolution.

This was one of the first books on 1989 and was published soon after the revolutions, in 1992. As you can see from the title, Frankland’s point is that, whatever else they were, these were patriotic revolutions. The mistake of some journalists both then and now is to portray the revolutions as a simple victory of capitalism over communism. Economic freedom, the desire for goods that had been unavailable, was part of it, but only a part of what patriotism and democracy would bring. What Frankland looks at is what brings people out of their lethargy, out of their armchairs and on to the street. What he does very well is to explain how important patriotism was, not nationalism but patriotism, and how pride in one’s own country, in one’s own identity was central to the motivation of these revolutions.

People in Eastern and Central Europe were rather well read about the history of their own nations. Although Communism stressed internationalism, the authorities didn’t dare to take down the monuments to the revolutionaries of 1848 [when liberal protesters rose up against the conservative establishment across Europe] and during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, a spontaneous revolt against Stalinism, people walked from statue to statue in remembrance of previous revolutionaries. They walked the same route in 1989. Frankland writes beautifully and is the kind of journalist who visits museums, talks to elderly historians and really explains what motivates people. If there had been more understanding of the patriotic element of 1989, I think more could have been done to prevent the disaster of Yugoslavia. One Croatian friend said to me in 1991: “We want to import Europe to Yugoslavia, but if you don’t let us then we’ll export Yugoslavia to Europe.” And in terms of the huge cost of Nato and UN operations and so on, that’s what happened.

Your next book is the autobiography of Pastor Tokes.

This is a small volume, written in the aftermath of 1989. Pastor Tokes was an ethnic Hungarian priest in Timisoara, and he describes here the experience of being a lone dissenting voice in Ceausescu’s Romania. They didn’t dare kill him, as they had other priests and dissenters, but he was actually sent to Timisoara to be kept under the watchful eye of a pro-regime priest who wouldn’t delegate any duties to Tokes and eventually died of overwork. Then suddenly he was told by the secret police that he was going to be expelled from his parish and from his home the following Friday. Tokes says he asked his congregation to be there and peacefully witness his expulsion, in the early Christian tradition of bearing witness. In fact, Tokes got worried when he saw them and asked them to go home. It now seems so inevitable – how could the Communist regime have survived? But people discovered then how brittle the regime in fact was. It was like a windscreen that can be shattered by one small stone, and that stone was Pastor Tokes.

I arrived ten days later for the BBC and I interviewed the people who had been there, the ethnic Hungarian members of the congregation and the Romanians who had joined them. At first the congregation, who had come holding candles, were suspicious of the Romanians, assuming they were agent provocateurs. But the Romanians had just had enough and had come to support the priest. They ended up marching on the Party Headquarters and smashing the windows. Pastor Tokes was the spark that lit the fuse that turned into a bloody revolution with over 1,000 dead, including, of course, Ceausescu himself.

There is a tendency to think that these revolutions were conspiracies led by a few dissidents or the military, but I have always maintained that they were genuine uprisings. Perhaps in Romania the uprising got hijacked, but these began as genuine revolutions led by the people.

Next you’ve chosen Dostoevsky by Nicholas Berdyaev.

The reason I like this so much is that it lays bare the thinking of two great Russians. Berdyaev fled the Revolution in 1921 having initially welcomed it as an expression of human freedom, much like the 1989 revolutions. But when he realised the oppressive nature of the new regime, he couldn’t tolerate it any more than it could tolerate him as an apostle of freedom.

I have always found Dostoevsky so Russian, so dense and overwhelming. You need to suspend your own life almost to read him. He’s sometimes too Russian, and I feel almost as though I haven’t got time for him because I’m trying to lead my own life. So, Berdyaev helps me into Dostoevsky. He sees Dostoevsky as a fellow spirit dealing with the dilemmas of human freedom and the sacrifices people are willing to make for freedom. This relates to my experience of 1989.

I met a man in Timisoara who told me that his 13-year-old daughter had asked him why they weren’t out there on the streets. He said: “What would happen to you children if we were killed?” And she replied: “Don’t the people on the streets have children too?” And I spoke to a man whose four-year-old son had his leg in plaster when he took him out to demonstrate, thinking the protest would be peaceful.