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The Book of the Week is “The Picnic, A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain” by Matthew Longo, published in 2024. This volume, whose language is awkward in spots, detailed some of the changes– especially in Hungary– that led to major transformations of balances of power in the world.
In sum, thousands of people acting together (rather than one dissident here and there) whose dissatisfaction reached critical mass, are what forced Eastern Europe to radically change politically, culturally, and socially, starting in the late 1980’s. Or, as the American 1960’s counter-culture expressed it: “United we stand. Divided they catch us one by one.”
The author called people who fled East Germany at the tail end of the 1980’s, refugees. They were actually immigrants. Refugees are fleeing from war, anarchy or starvation where their lives are in danger 24/7. Immigrants move to a different country because their own country dooms them to a life of crushing oppression, but no immediate life-threatening danger.
Anyway, by the late 1980’s, there appeared signs that the Soviet yoke of Communism in Hungary was becoming frayed, as its leaders sensed the people were approaching the point at which beheadings or a firing squad of themselves was in the offing.
In 1988,
- “Moscow” (the authority that ruled all Soviet satellites, which included Hungary) allowed Hungarians to form non-Communist parties, although the new parties had only advisory power;
- Moscow restored the freedom of assembly;
- Hungary’s economy was tanking, so its Communist functionaries appointed as its prime minister, a young economist– Miklos Nemeth, a believer in free markets and democratic elections– who had studied in the US;
- Moscow began to allow the issuance of special travel visas for families to drive into Austria to shop for Western consumer goods with a $350 government subsidy.
And in 1989,
- The Hungarian minister of state delivered a radio address, shocking listeners (who had been brainwashed by Soviet propaganda for decades) with the truth about the 1956 uprising and incredibly, he wasn’t shot or hanged by his comrades;
- In Budapest, police allowed a public protestor’s recitation of a poem about tyranny;
- The Hungarian prime minister asked Mikhail Gorbachev to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, and the latter agreed to withdraw a few, as a public relations gesture;
- Through Gorbachev’s permissive policy that each Soviet satellite’s leader could take whatever political actions he deemed necessary to keep the peasants from revolting, Nemeth ordered the dismantling of electrified barbed wire at Hungary’s borders with Austria and Czechoslovakia;
- Some of the Stasi (the ubiquitous, brutal [Soviet] East German spying agency– the new breed of “Nazis” after WII), actually directed East Germans toward a border-crossing location, or stood by and let Hungarians and West Germans help the East Germans run through the gap in the barbed wire, in order to cross the border to Austria or Czechoslovakia.
There were countless other societal changes taking place in Eastern Europe. In June 1989, a few Hungarian dissidents who were forming a new political party, planned a picnic as a symbol of friendship among Hungarians, East Germans and Austrians.
In October 1989, the GDR turned forty years old. “There were lavish parties, honoring years of Soviet-East German cooperation.” Small wonder why the peasants were revolting. By November 1989, the Soviets had secretly moved all their nuclear weapons located in Hungary, to Ukraine. By the dawn of the 1990’s, the Hungarian Communist Party had ultimately renamed itself the “Hungarian Republic.” BUT a one-party State is not a democracy!
The former Stasi spies who got new jobs after the USSR dissolved, felt right at home helping Western businesses seek new markets in Eastern Europe. For, skills required for the jobs included exploitation, expropriation, and data collection.
The author wrote that a compromise between capitalism and socialism is possible. In 2009, he had a reunion with an East German couple who had fled to West Germany. They were very anti-Communist, but also shunned using crassly commercial, modern technology such as mobile phones and email. They didn’t care that they weren’t keeping up with the Joneses. Their experience in the East taught them to be grateful for the material possessions they did have.
But it’s actually not that simple. If everyone disengaged completely from their automated lifestyles and electronic communications, the world economy would crash.
Read the book to learn about various East Germans who left their homeland for what they perceived to be a better life after seeing how the non-Communist world lived, and about some of the historical changes wrought in their region of the globe.