Demonstrations calling for democratic reform spread across eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989. See how the Guardian reported on them – and on the misgivings in the west about the speed of change

70,000 march in Leipzig to demand changes

by Michael Simmons in Berlin

10 October 1989

Up to 70,000 people marched through Leipzig last night demanding reforms. A huge police and paramilitary deployment watched, but did not intervene.

Before the march, officials of the Leipzig Communist Party leadership promised publicly they would push for a free exchange of ideas between citizens and the government, Lutheran church sources said. ‘Several thousand’ demonstrators had also gathered in front of an East Berlin church, West German radio reported.

Protesters marched through Leipzig shouting: ‘We need freedom’, ‘Democracy’, and ‘No violence’, said witnesses. A number of paramilitary troopers who had been called in chatted with protesters.

Mr Christoph Wonneberger, pastor for the Lukas church in Leipzig, said there were ‘at least’ 70,000 demonstrators and he was surprised by the apparent restraint of police and paramilitary troops.

Some demonstrators ‘began conversations with paramilitary troops’ after the crowd started dispersing by mid-evening, Mr Wonneberger said. The Leipzig party statement said: ‘We all need a free exchange of ideas about how we should continue Socialism in our nation.’ The message was read over the state-controlled Leipzig radio, during prayer services in four city churches, and over loudspeakers during the demonstration, witnesses said.

Last night in East Berlin’s Gethsemane Church, where thousands of protesters have gathered and taken refuge in recent weeks, Bishop Gottfried Forck urged a crowd of 3,000 people to speak their minds, but warned against taking part in ‘unauthorised street demonstrations’. He also implored the Communist leadership to take steps towards a democratic future. Many of the hundreds of demonstrators arrested over the weekend have already been sentenced to up to six months’ imprisonment.

Frontier guards at the Checkpoint Charlie and Friedrichstrasse crossing points into East Berlin yesterday physically barred the way to journalists and to many would-be tourists to prevent them even reaching passport control desks.

In Dresden, after a weekend of violence, church leaders are seeking a dialogue with the civic authorities. This could make or break the career of the supposed reformist, Mr Hans Modrow, the city’s Communist Party secretary. East German commentators, giving way to the defensive tendencies associated with the leadership, yesterday labelled demonstrators ‘marauding mobs of troublemakers’.

However, evidence accumulates that the opposition is growing. Details were released yesterday of the inaugural meeting of a Social Democratic Party. This will anger the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), since it is itself the result of an amalgamation of the old Communist Party and the then Social Democrats.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leipzig, 9 October 1989. Source: YouTube.

The SDP meeting was attended by delegates from all over East Germany and appointed a 15-man executive, to be led by a 35-year-old historian, Mr Ibrahim Bohme, who used to be in the SED.

The New Forum yesterday called on all East Germans to take steps to replace the country’s leadership. Several hundred trade unionists at the old-established Berlin engineering works, Bergmann-Borsig, have called on the country’s trade union leader, Mr Harry Tisch, to open a dialogue on changes they say are ‘urgently necessary’ in all areas of society.

The most radical change in the East bloc since the second world war: Hungarian Communist Party says its farewells to the old Stalinist dogmas

by Ian Traynor in Budapest

11 October 1989

The leadership elections for Hungary‘s new Socialist Party ranked as a victory for the moderate middle ground of the party leader, Mr Rezso Nyers, against the more radical reformist wing in personal power terms, but in political philosophy terms the party’s ditching of Communism as its guiding ideology is arguably the most radical statement from the ruling class in Eastern Europe since Stalin stamped his will on the region after the second world war.

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The new programme, rule book, and historical statement overwhelmingly endorsed by the emergency party congress that ended in the small hours of yesterday morning waved a not too fond farewell to the central dogmas, honed in Moscow, that have governed the region for the past 40 years.

No more dictatorship of the proletariat, no more dictatorship of the Politburo either. The latter, formally known as democratic centralism, is replaced by a commitment to freedom of opinion and expression within the new party.

Mr Gorbachev has gone this far, too, with his advocacy of ‘socialist pluralism’, but the key difference is that the Hungarians have abjured any right to a ‘leading role’ and committed themselves to a multi-party political system.

This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.

Commentary: Shivers down the spine of Europe

by John Palmer

11 October 1989

The speed and unpredictability of events in eastern Europe are causing almost as many hairs to grey in Brussels as in Berlin or Prague. At both Nato and the European Commission there is no mistaking the misgivings and the growing concern about the pace of change in the East and there is significantly less euphoria than earlier this summer.

Of course there are those who revel in the ideological defeat sustained by the ‘Communist’ world and who openly proclaim the West’s final ‘victory’ over the East as a fitting culmination to the 40-year-old confrontation which began with the onset of Cold War in 1948. But this is not the language employed by the more perceptive strategists at NATO headquarters; the talk is more about the danger that the Warsaw Pact may disintegrate before the West has decided what its response should be.

To some extent this simply reflects apprehension that if the Warsaw Pact breaks up, the last remaining rationale for Nato’s own existence disappears as well. This partly explains why its secretary general, Mr Manfred Woerner, has tried to make out a case for Nato’s future role being to ‘contain’ even a post-Communist and heavily disarmed Russia which, nonetheless, would remain a significant geo-political power.

Of course the Cold War Tweedledum has always depended on the continued existence of Tweedledee. Hence the extravagance of some western ‘Soviet threat’ theorists who are now reduced to basing their case for continued western military preparedness on the danger that an unduly rapid break-up of the Soviet Union itself might destabilise the alliance by encouraging similarly centripetal tendencies in the West.

No one in their right mind can dispute the obvious dangers that accompany the traumas in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and parts of the Soviet Union. The threat that a frightened bureaucracy might unleash a European ‘Tiananmen Square’ existed long before Mr Honecker’s thinly veiled warning this week to the democracy movement in the GDR.

Quite apart from the risk of an eventual lurch back to violent repression, no one should underestimate the growing economic and social tensions which are to be found as much in those east European countries which have embarked on the road of market liberalisation as in those still clinging to the decaying remnants of a Stalinist command economy.

That is why Mr Lech Walesa’s recent warning of the possibility of civil war sent so many shivers down the spine of European Community governments.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mikhail Gorbachev, Erich Honecker and other Eastern Bloc head of states, 7 October 1989. Photograph: U. Baumgarten via Getty Images

The Solidarity chief was complaining about the accelerating rate of price increases in Poland – something which goes to the heart of the liberalising strategy being urged on the east Europeans by the West. However the involvement of the European Commission in the economic reform programmes of the authorities in Budapest and Warsaw already goes far beyond the proffering of food aid and economic advice.

The Commission, also acting on behalf not just of the west Europeans but of the 24 OECD western industrialised nations, is also helping the Polish and Hungarian governments prepare the wholesale restructuring of their agriculture and industry, using resources created in part by the sale at market prices of surplus EC foodstocks to carry this through.

If this strategy goes wrong or if it leads to confrontation with Polish or Hungarian workers in the months and years ahead, the political blame may fall as much on the European Community as on the authorities in Budapest or Prague.

But whatever their doubts about economic restructuring, all the signs are that the Hungarians and the Poles want to move politically closer to the European Community. And they are unlikely to be alone in this ambition.

The secession-minded Slovene in Yugoslavia have hinted that they would love to march hand in hand with their Austrian neighbours into the EC, while similar noises off are coming from the Baltic states which are, at the same time, planning to cut their economies adrift from the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile influential socialist opposition thinkers, such as Boris Kagarlitsky in the Soviet Union and some leaders of the Polish Socialist Party, increasingly talk of a ‘third camp’ strategy between Stalinism and free market capitalism. But they envisage this in terms of democratic planning of the ecology and the environment at a pan-European rather than a purely national level.

The Commission’s President, Mr Jacques Delors, does not disguise his alarm at the pace of these developments. Quite apart from the nightmare proportions of the economic and political problems the aspirant east European member states would bring with them to Brussels, he knows that other west European EFTA countries (notably Austria and Norway) are also edging closer to the 12.

The conventional wisdom in Brussels is that a new enlargement to absorb the admittedly rich and relatively successful EFTA countries could kill the Community’s own integration plans stone dead. Officials find unthinkable the prospect of also having to integrate east European economies which are bound to remain crisis ridden for years to come.

The belief that enlargement is the enemy of European integration is, on the historical evidence, suspect. It is true that the original six EC member states were far more homogeneous economically and politically than the present 12. But the admission of Britain, Denmark and Ireland did force the development of more serious regional and social policies in the EC. The accession of the three Mediterranean countries since then helped trigger the long overdue reform of the Common Agricultural Policy – and directly stimulated the Single European Act and its modest reforms of the Community’s decision making processes.

The simple fact is that any further enlargement of the Community – even one involving relatively unproblematic west European countries such as Norway – would make further reform of the EC institutions imperative. And such a reform could only really be in the direction of greater ‘federalism’ given the supranational character of the economic, political and social challenges facing Europe.

It is not so much that the EC would extend its authority into areas which are presently the unchallenged preserve of national and (in some countries) regional government. But an enlarged Community would still have to be given greater authority where developments in the real world are continuing to overtake the scope of national states.

Mr Delors recognises that if the European Community itself is not the best instrument for a wider and increasing pan-European grouping, some other body will have to be created for just this purpose. But until now no one has dared even sketch out what such a pan-European framework might look like and whether it would subsume interested east Europeans as well as the EC and the six EFTA states. Neither has anyone dared speculate about how far this body would need to have some supranational authority to be of any use.

Until the present explosion of opposition to the regime in the GDR, it was just possible to imagine that there was time enough to work out some long-term and gradualist goals for a wider European reunification. What is now happening on the streets of Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin is dramatically foreshortening that time.

East Germans oust Honecker

19 October 1989

by Anna Tomforde in Bonn

East Germany yesterday moved to put an end to the most traumatic and agonising crisis in its recent history by replacing Mr Erich Honecker, the country’s ageing leader, with Mr Egon Krenz, the youngest member of the Politburo.

But Mr Krenz, aged 52, who was one of the first to applaud the crushing of the democracy movement in China, and even went to Beijing to offer his congratulations, has a reputation as a hardliner.

Bulgarian dissidents win temporary green light

by Denise Searle and Mike Power in Sofia

23 October 1989

A breath of political fresh air is blowing through the Bulgarian capital as the opposition has won a green light to pursue its activities for the first time in 40 years.

Under the protection of a large contingent of foreign diplomats and journalists here for an East-West environmental conference, Bulgaria’s fledgling dissident movement has organised mass meetings and open-air rallies, held press conferences and issued policy statements.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ecoglasnost protester. Photograph: Chris Niedenthal/LIFE Images Collection via Getty

Such activities are still small compared with protests in other East European countries, but their scale has taken the authorities and even the dissidents themselves by surprise.

Bulgaria’s greens, Ecoglasnost, had by last night collected more than 5,000 signatures after nine consecutive days of campaigning on the streets of central Sofia. A leading member of Ecoglasnost, Beyan Kiurianov, said: ‘It seems we are being tolerated .. while journalists and diplomats from 35 countries are in Sofia. We must speak out while we have the chance.’

Ecoglasnost is protesting against the siting of a nuclear power station on the Danube island of Belene which they say is on an earthquake zone, and also against a project to divert the Mesta River which flows into northern Greece.

By Ian Traynor in Prague

9 November 1989

The Czechoslovak leadership has hoped against hope these past couple of years that President Gorbachev would not last. Now it finds the East Berlin-Prague axis, linking Eastern Europe’s two strongest economies against perestroika, is suddenly in shreds.

A deepening and less than splendid isolation is settling over the country. Its fundamentalist leaders are pursuing an unrelenting campaign of repression against their critics while radical changes are afoot all around.

The Czechs and Slovaks could watch the cataclysmic events of the past six months in Poland and Hungary with no real inclination to emulate their poverty-stricken neighbours.

‘East Germany is different, unlike Poland, where the motive for change was empty shelves,’ says Mr Jiri Dienstbier, the head of the editorial board of the main underground newspaper. ‘People here regard the GDR with a certain respect and events there now show that the people can overthrow the leadership. The East Berlin-Prague axis is now lost. The leaders here cannot make an axis with Ceausescu or Tirana. These are completely different political cultures.’

E Berlin breaks with 40 years of history

by Michael Simmons

9 November 1989

Forty years of history were dramatically swept aside yesterday with the announcement that the ruling East German Communist Party is apparently willing to contest free elections.

The fact that the party is now looking at defeat as a distinct possibility represents the most emphatic break yet with the whole trajectory of the country’s post-war history.

It had kept power with the help of a ubiquitous state security network, and it was apparently unwilling to take serious notice of the rising tide of popular discontent inside the country or of the meteorological changes outside the country, where reform and change were being swept along by the prevailing wind.

Mr Honecker’s closest allies in his last few months were the most notable ‘conservatives’ of the Warsaw Pact - the Czechoslovak leader, Mr Milos Jakes, and the Romanian leader, President Nicolae Ceausescu.

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The Soviet Union under President Gorbachev, backed up by Hungary and Poland, has ditched the Brezhnev era ‘of stagnation’ once and for all. The East German population who know this all too well from their daily consumption of the West German media have needed no telling that the old men at the top of the GDR belonged very much to that era, if not to the era of Stalin that had gone before.

Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania are still in the Brezhnev era and will, overtly or covertly, feel that much more isolated as East Germany, until so recently a dependable friend who more or less spoke their language, has moved into a new and palpably different phase.

But even in Bulgaria, as the past two weeks have shown, and in Czechoslovakia, there is the sort of underlying discontent, surfacing from time to time in street demonstrations, which Mr Honecker and company chose to ignore. The winds are beginning to be felt in Prague and Sofia as well.

This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.