REVOLUTION IN EASTERN EUROPE 401began to question the foundations of Gorbachëv’s foreign policy. On
12 March 1989, after returning from a trip to Prague, he told the Polit-
buro that ‘the Czechs’ were upset about Soviet publications that implied
a wish to take ‘the capitalist road’. Gorbachëv brushed aside any such
idea: ‘A total dog’s dinner. It would only make sense if we were raising
the question of private farmers. But that would be unrealizable and
devastating.’^2 Whereas he disliked the most radical economic options,
he had bolder thoughts about politics. In early April, when Gorbachëv
met Hungarian General Secretary Károly Grósz, they had a conversa-
tion which would have been inconceivable only months earlier. Grósz
indicated the intention of disbanding his Politburo and allowing the
party to elect a new leadership for the country’s benefit. Shakhnazarov
joked that this was something worth trying in the USSR. Gorbachëv
quipped that his own Central Committee would never come up with
the necessary Politburo.^3 It was in the same month that Jaruzelski in
Poland arrived at a grand bargain to accord legal status to Solidarity.
The Soviet leadership immediately offered approval.^4 Despite what he
said to Grósz about the Central Committee, Gorbachëv could still rely
on his Politburo.
On 20 May 1989 Shevardnadze and Honecker had a discussion on
economic questions. Honecker thanked the USSR effusively for nor-
malizing relations with the People’s Republic of China, but Eastern
Europe acutely worried him. The Hungarian communist authorities
were wandering into the dangerous territory of the unknown, and
Honecker urged that ‘Poland mustn’t be lost’.^5 On the other side of the
Iron Curtain there were equally extraordinary conversations. Thoughts
that had once seemed utopian were quietly being voiced. Mitterrand
told Bush in May 1989 that he was not opposed to German reunifica-
tion: he just wanted it to happen – if at all – over a ten-year period.^6
The Polish elections of 4 June, which by chance took place on the
same day as tanks rolled over the bodies of protesters on Tiananmen
Square, resulted in a massive victory for Solidarity. There was joy and
shock across Poland as the Polish communists went down to a humil-
iating defeat. When the full results became available, Solidarity had
won all but one of the hundred seats in the Senate. It also took 173 out
of 460 seats in the lower house – the Sejm; this was an equally remark-
able achievement because Jaruzelski had drawn up an electoral law
that prevented Solidarity from contesting sixty-five per cent of Sejm
seats. Even the Solidarity leadership failed to anticipate the scale of
its triumph. Jaruzelski decided to brazen it out and, with his still-