Free The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer Page A

century.
    As 1989 began, then, Miklos Nemeth and his fellow revolutionaries quietly went about their business, largely alone, unnoticed and without allies in what would be a bitter and potentially fatal struggle for power. Nemeth was under no illusions about the depth of Hungary’s crisis, nor why he had been tapped as prime minister. He was being set up. He was to be the communists’ fall guy, the man whom the people would blame when the economy completely crumbled.
    Grosz and other party leaders feared they could not arrest Hungary’s economic slide—30 percent inflation, the highest per capita foreign debt in Europe, falling living standards and wages. Few Hungarian families could make ends meet without working two or even three jobs. Resentment was growing. So that May, at a fractious party conference, they looked around for a potential scapegoat to become prime minister. Nemeth, then head of the party economics department, was their choice. “I was the innocuous compromise candidate,” he would tell me years later, recounting the story of his surprising rise and expected fall—a man who could be counted on to make no waves. Let Nemeth try these “reforms,” their thinking went. “If he fails, we can blame him. As for me, I would be kicked out and painted as a young and energetic expert—who failed. Politically, I would be dead.”
    Nemeth figured he had six months. Every move he made during this time had a single objective: to loosen the grip of the party on his government. “Nothing was more important.” Without breaking free of the party, he could not push economic reform. Without promoting democracy and a more pluralist society, he could not break free of the party. And so it was. Those exciting conversations with Nemeth and Kulcsar, the talk of democracy and a bill of rights inspired by Madison and Jefferson: it was perfectly genuine, but it was also realpolitik—a means to an end in a brutal tug-of-war for power. How this battle was fought, in coming months, would decide the future of communism in Hungary and set the stage, by late summer, for more dramatic events—the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe.
    I wasn’t conscious of any of this at the time I flew back to Bonn, the sleepy city on the Rhine that was then Germany’s capital, where I lived with my young family. More subliminally, though, I wonder. Just before New Year’s, I did a late-night radio show somewhere in the United States, one of those midnight-to-dawn broadcasts where time stands still and the audience is anyone driving long distances through the darkness. We talked for nearly two hours: what was happening in Moscow, in Eastern Europe, what the new year might bring. I spoke about Hungary, the nobility of what I saw, my own feelings of a deep upwelling promise, how something was in the air in the East that we in the West hadn’t yet sensed. Maybe it was the transport of the moment. Perhaps it was living for the first time in such a haunted land as Germany. The Rhine flowed past our house in the silent darkness, history entered in. I went so far as to say that the Wall might soon come down, possibly by next Christmas!
    Was it a moment of clarity and insight, or a fantasy that somehow came to pass? Whatever, even I did not believe it in the morning.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Miraculous Conversion
    General Wojciech Jaruzelski was famous for his dark sunglasses and ramrod-stiff bearing. He was the infamous Polish strongman who declared martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981. He had crushed the Solidarity trade union, rising up in the summer of 1980 to challenge communist rule, and jailed its leaders. Yet in the early winter of 1989, he correctly sensed the change in political climate and knew what to do.
    Like Hungary, Poland was in crisis. Like Hungary, it was chiefly economic. And like Hungary, this crisis was