The World

In May 1989, Gorbachev’s arrival in Beijing embarrassed Deng, who was losing control of his own capital. Almost a million protesters, most of them students, were camped in Tiananmen Square, gathered around a huge papier-mâché statue, the Lady of Liberty, demanding democracy as the leadership agonized about what to do. The eighty-five-year-old Deng was still chairman of the Central Military Commission, but he was semi-retired, having handed over to chosen successors who had failed to restrain widening protests against corruption and nepotism. In April, after anti-reformers had ordered that Deng’s ally Hu Yaobang be fired, Hu died of a heart attack, sparking pro-democracy protests at his funeral. A Deng protégé, the general secretary Zhao Ziyang, went to talk to the students. After Gorbachev had left, on 17 May, Deng, convening the Party grandees nicknamed the Eight Immortals in Zhongnanhai, said he feared that ‘Their goal is to establish a totally western-dependent bourgeois republic,’ and warned, ‘There’s no way to back down now without the situation spiralling out of control.’ Little Cannon reached for his gun: troops were massed; Zhao spoke to the protesters in tears and was promptly dismissed by Deng. The Eight Immortals – all men except Zhou Enlai’s widow, Deng Yingchao – voted to crush the rebels.

On 2 June, Deng commanded that ‘order be restored to the capital … No person may impede the advance of the troops.’ The soldiers ‘can act in self-defence and use any means to clear impediments’. The ‘impediments’ were the students, who had built barricades. The army retook the streets. A soldier was killed, stripped naked and suspended from a bus, but then the army started firing. One student stood in front of a column of tanks, halted them and climbed on to the turret to denounce the soldiers. Hundreds were killed.

Appointing new leaders, Deng retired, keeping only the chairmanship of the China Bridge Association. But he remained Paramount Leader, and confirmed his policy of political power with economic freedom before he died at ninety-two. Deng had created a template for Chinese power, Gorbachev an accelerating momentum towards Soviet disintegration. Only force could stop it.

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In September 1989, Poland elected a non-Communist premier; East Germans probed the borders; within the USSR, Georgians, led by a mad-eyed Shakespeare professor and former dissident, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, voted for independence as their own minorities, Ossetians and Abkhazians, fought for their own states; Armenians and Azeris clashed. At least Gorbachev’s rival, Yeltsin, was disintegrating too. On the 28th, he turned up extravagantly drunk at Gorbachev’s birthday party with a bouquet and tried to gate-crash. Bodyguards roughed him up and threw him into the Moskva River. ‘The water was terribly cold,’ said Yeltsin. ‘I collapsed and lay on the ground … I staggered to the nearby police station.’ Gorbachev’s allies claimed that Yeltsin’s mistress had thrown a bucket of water over him; his allies saw an assassination attempt. The Yeltsin threat was clearly over.

At 11.30 p.m., Berlin time, on 9 November, East German leaders, pressured by the opening of the Austria–Hungary border and then by huge demonstrations, planned quietly to open the gates in the Wall, but bungled the announcement, sparking joyous demonstrations as people suddenly poured through the gates and started to tear down the Berlin Wall with axes and bare hands. In Dresden, as crowds stormed Stasi headquarters across East Germany, an astonished KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, aged thirty-seven, burned secret files and then started the miserable drive home to Leningrad. In Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Communists were swept away in velvet revolutions. Some were less velvety than others: on Christmas Day 1989 in Bucharest, Romania, a frightened but defiant sexagenarian couple were dragged out of the belly of an armoured personnel carrier. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife Elena had ruled Romania since 1965. Now Ceaus¸escu was overthrown by his own comrades and the people in a shootout with his Securitate agents and quickly sentenced to death. Four soldiers were assigned to shoot them separately, but they insisted on dying together, singing the Internationale. They died mid-verse.