more readily available to accelerate the regimes’
plans to catch up with the West industrially.
These, too, failed. The heaviest burdened were
the East Germans, whose debt increased from
$1.4 billion in 1971 to $20.7 billion in 1988.
They were fortunate: their debts were assumed
by the Federal Republic. The Poles ($1.1 billion
debt in 1971) groaned under a debt of over $48.5
billion in 1991, and the Hungarians suffered from
massive foreign debts, the highest amount per
head. The only ‘virtuous’ country was Romania.
By draconian measures, which drove much of the
population below any tolerable living standard,
Ceaus ̧escu had, by the time of his fall in 1990,
paid off his country’s debts, which totalled $10
billion in 1981. Neither he nor his family shared
the austerity he imposed on his countrymen: they
lacked nothing in the way of imported Western
luxuries. In this respect he was only an extreme
example of Eastern European communist leader-
ship, all of which did very well out of commu-
nism and Soviet protection.
The corruption was obvious and open. But the
regimes also had a large privileged clientele who
benefited from their continuing in power. The
host of bureaucrats needed in the central planning
ministries, the officers in the army, the secret
police and the party, and trade union functionar-
ies, all had a vested interest in upholding the com-
munist state system. Now and then, at worst, one
leader might be replaced by another, but in the
1970s and 1980s there were remarkably few
changes in the upper reaches of the communist
leadership. Poland, in the wake of the Solidarity
crisis of 1979 to 1982, was something of an
exception. The election of a Polish cardinal, Karol
Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II in 1978 greatly
encouraged the Polish people in their resistance
to communism. His visit to Poland in 1983 after
the suppression of Solidarity prompted a massive
demonstration of resistance and independence.
But few foresaw the collapse of communist rule
in Eastern Europe much before it happened. The
impact of the year of revolution, 1989, was there-
fore all the greater.
With hindsight it is possible to discern the roots
of that revolution, the discontent of the masses
that boiled over, and the reason why the commu-
nist leaders were afraid to resort to bloody repres-
sion – why, had they tried to do so, the forces
ready to do their bidding were no longer strong
enough. It was the mass of the people who rose
against the leadership. Not only intellectuals and
dissidents but hundreds of thousands of formerly
good communists turned on a system they had
previously supported. In the face of realities, of
oppression and of falling living standards, they
became utterly disillusioned. Once they realised
they were no longer a small group that could be
harried, beaten and imprisoned, the people began
to lose their fear of the state. Increasing contacts
with the West in the 1970s and 1980s rendered
the contrast in living standards even starker. What
fanned discontent, however, were not just poor
living standards and dwindling hopes of a better
future but the growing recognition that their lead-
ers and the whole communist system of repression
and economic management were the cause of
their troubles.
The new thinking stimulated by Gorbachev in
the Soviet Union spread to the smaller nations of
Eastern Europe with electrifying effect after 1987.
The communist leaderships could not adjust
themselves to realities. They remained cocooned,
brainwashed by their own ideology and propa-
ganda. There is no better illustration of this than
Ceaus ̧escu’s last appearance on 22 December
1989, on the balcony of his palace, unable to
make himself heard over the catcalls of the crowd
gathered in the square below. The complete
bewilderment of a once all-powerful man, whose
only experience for years had been hero-worship
and the sound of sycophantic clapping in unison,
showed on his face in television pictures beamed
around the world. Even on the day the opposi-
tion stood him and his hated wife Elena against
a wall to be shot, they were both convinced that
the people loved them. It was Christmas Day.
Absolute power not only corrupts, it also blinds.
Until the year of revolution, the communist
leaderships had felt sufficiently secure to assert a
measure of national independence from Soviet
economic and political control. To that extent,
the Gorbachev phenomenon was welcome. He
promised, in April 1985, a month after coming to
power, to accord full respect for the sovereignty of
1
THE IRON CURTAIN DISINTEGRATES 889
