The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer

Author:Michael Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Vortex of Change

Each year, every year, the herds of East Africa’s Serengeti Plain begin a vast migration. They gather by the millions: wildebeests, giraffes, zebras, antelope, lions and hyenas. It is impossible to predict precisely when it will begin, but there are unmistakable signs. The animals grow impatient. They mill about, clashing with one another, pawing the ground in rising uncertainty and irritation. The atmosphere, the very air, becomes heavy with their heat. This may go on for weeks. Then one day, seemingly for no particular reason, they bolt—abruptly, all at once, a pell-mell, headlong run in this or that direction. They move as one, an irresistible force. Nothing could stop it, nothing can guide it.

By autumn, this was the mood in Eastern Europe. The air was heavy with a brooding, unpredictable inevitability. From afar, the prospects were exciting. A Warsaw Pact without Poland or Hungary was easily imaginable. So was another Prague Spring, even the fall of the Wall. Privately, Helmut Kohl began to talk about an end of communism and hinted at a reunified Germany. Yet those living the events were fearful. Where there are herds, there are also predators. Where there is change, there is danger. Who knew what abrupt ugliness the times might bring? Hope was checked by caution, bred of the bitter experience of 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1980.

Traveling through the region in late September and early October was to run with the herds. By then, the sheer velocity of change had, in itself, become the most powerful force for change. Events in one country immediately spilled over to others. Overnight, Eastern Europe became less a geography than a volatile physics: plasma in motion, a blinding and bewildering kaleidoscopic whirl. Everyone seemed to be going at different speeds, in different directions, toward destinations unknown. In Poland, only months before, Solidarity had sought at most a restoration of its legal standing; now, it was grappling with the ambiguous spoils of victory. Hungary stood on the very threshold of success in its drive to bring down communism. By contrast, Czechoslovakia had scarcely begun to move. Tantalizing glimpses of what might be possible were obscured by dust, commotion, frenzy and fear.

My editors in New York suggested I take a sweep through the region, to look at it as one story rather than several, to watch it as a process and try to figure out where it might all lead. Stephen Smith, the executive editor of Newsweek, came along. We dubbed ourselves the Marx Brothers, lost in the unrecognizable terrain of Absurdistan. Down was up, and up was down. Sometimes it was hard to tell the heroes from the villains. No fantasy could match the bizarre realities and jarring contrasts that we encountered. Certainly, no fantasy could match its pregnant drama.

We began in Poland. Once again, Solidarity was fighting for its life, only this time as a government rather than a broken opposition. What a curious evolution! In early July, after its tumultuous election win, the once-banned union found itself to be the dominant political force in the country.

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