Europe's Revolution - 20 years on

Monday 9 November was the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the outstanding event in the wave of changes which swept Eastern Europe in 1989, and which triggered the collapse of Communism and the ending of the Cold War.

To mark the anniversary, RTÉ Europe Correspondent Tony Connelly embarked on a train journey through the key capitals of the old Eastern Europe to recall the spectacular changes of 1989 and to reflect on what independence means to the people of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany.

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6 November - Warsaw, Poland

The dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel said that, for the ordinary people mentally crushed by the weight of the communist system, the only appropriate antidote was 'to live within the Truth.'

What he meant was that since resistance against the system was so futile - especially since the system was ultimately guaranteed through the threat of overwhelming force - then the best that men and women could do to cope was to live decent lives, expressing 'values like trust, openness, responsibility and love...'

As Europe reflects on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, Poles may be forgiven for thinking they ultimately did more than 'live within the Truth.' According to a common reading of the events of 1989, they took action, and took it much earlier.

A debate will continue about the futility or otherwise of taking action against such a monolithic system which reached into every aspect of life, a system backed up by the Soviet tank. Hungarians rose up in 1956 and the Czechs had their Prague Spring in 1968. Both were ruthlessly crushed.

Poland, on the other hand, had a long tradition of rising up against their occupiers. From 1795 until 1918, Poland had been carved three ways between the Russians, the Austrians and the Prussians. Poles flung themselves against their oppressors with 18 uprisings, nearly all of which ended in heroic failure.

The last uprising, against the Nazis in Warsaw in 1944, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the city being razed to dust.

Poland was a devastated country when the Red Army installed a Communist regime. Its secret police infiltrated every aspect of life from the cradle to the grave.

'It was an oppressive system which controlled every sphere of the citizen's life,' recalls Zbigniew Bujak, once an electrician in a tractor plant in Warsaw, later a leading Solidarity dissident. 'It controls the schools when I'm a student, it controls my workplace when I get older, it controls the books I'm reading, the television I'm watching, the radio I'm listening to. It was a natural impulse to try to get rid of it.'

There had been upheavals, demonstrations and riots here and there throughout the regime's lifespan, in 1956, 1968, 1971 and 1975. Each time they were met with repression and a reinstallation of a tougher regime. The strike by workers in Poznan, whose stance actually triggered the uprising in Hungary, brought three Russian tank brigades perilously close to the Polish border.

The Catholic Church, meanwhile, either suffered waves of repression, or it enjoyed a kind of servile accommodation which was there to ultimately serve the communist system.

Some priests ended up collaborating, but many others were intimated, beaten, or, in the case of Fr Jerzy Popieluszko, murdered. His parish in northern Warsaw remains a powerful shrine to his memory, but also to resistance. As the events of 1989 swept the continent, no visit by a foreign leader to Poland was complete without an excursion to St Stanislaw Kostka Church.

Fr Jerzy had spoken out frequently against the Communist Party and paid the price: in 1985 he was abducted by the secret police and beaten to death, his body dumped in the River Vistula.

'The church absolutely played a huge role because there would be no Solidarity underground without the church,' says Wlodzimierz Kuligowski, a parishioner praying at Fr Jerzy's grave. 'It gave money, sent food packages, forced the government to grant amnesty amnesties, encouraged the secret police not to beat prisoners. Without the Church there would be no 1989.'

But Poland's road to independence required other elements. By the 1970s there was a growing underground movement, publishing pamphlets and disseminating ideas. They were themselves inspired by Russian dissidents, especially the physicist Andre Sakharov. For the movement in Poland to succeed it needed to reach out to workers. People like Zbigniew Bujak, the electrician from the tractor plant in Warsaw.

'In the beginning it was an alien world,' he tells me. 'I had seen intellectuals on tv, read them in the press, heard them on radio. But these were controlled by the Communists. Are they with me or against me? I thought. My first feeling was that they were elements of the regime. KOR [the Workers Defence Committee set up in 1976] proved to me, however, that there was a group of great intellectuals who were different.'

When intellectuals and workers pooled their resources (it didn't always happen, of course) there were the elements of a credible resistance. In 1980 shipyard workers went on strike in Gdansk over the sacking of a union official and price rises. As the strikers gained world attention, the authorities in Warsaw were forced into a compromise agreement, an element of which allowed Solidarity, the incipient workers movement, to set up trade unions across Poland.

'I was just an electrician,' recalls Zbigniew. 'But now I had a task, to organise a free trade union which would act for me personally. I became an active citizen. In the years before, the authorities did everything they could to make citizens as passive as possible. In the best cases there were promises, but never before had we got tasks to make us active citizens.'

Zbigniew's new role did not come without a price. In 1981 as millions of Poles joined the new trade union movement, the authorities panicked and General Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Party, introduced Martial Law. Zbigniew spent four years on the run, and several in jail, on one occasion eluding the authorities by jumping out of a Black Maria police van after a round-up.

Solidarity's initial programme was modest. They focussed their demons on social change and workers' rights without demanding an overthrow of the system.

As millions of Poles joined the trade union movement, their demands became more ambitious, and the regime, fearing the movement was getting out of control, imposed Martial Law. The tanks on the streets were, however, Polish and not Russian.

In a lavish office in Warsaw I meet Jerzy Orban, a former journalist who later became the official spokesman of the Jaruzelski regime in the 1980s (he wrote a column criticising Fr Popieluszko a month before he was murdered).

Now in his late 60s, he is a millionaire publisher who has made a late career as the enfant terrible of the new Poland, delighting in what are seen as highly provocative attacks on what might be regarded as the Solidarity-Catholic consensus of the establishment (a former communist he showed us photographs of himself, guzzling champagne in the jacuzzi of his sprawling villa.

Now, 20 years after 1989 Mr Urban is unrepentant. 'I don't regret anything,' he says. 'Just as in sport, the member of a losing team doesn't regret playing even if he lost. The policy was the right one, things like Martial Law, the economic reforms. Of course some things came too late, we made some mistakes and there was some unnecessary repression.'

Urban insists the changes in Eastern Europe are attributable only to Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika reforms. In the mid 1980s, the communist regime in Poland sensed change was coming, but they had no idea how revolutionary it would be.

'The feeling was widespread inside the regime that change was coming, but we didn't imagine how it would look like in the future. Our feeling was that there would be some convergence, a third way, a mixture of real communism, and the ideas of solidarity.'

That sense of uncertainty was shared by the Solidarity movement, which, by the mid 1980s, was illegal and had gone underground. By the end of the decade there were further strikes and more unrest, especially over price rises.

Bereft of ideas, and with public support ebbing, the communist regime was forced into a humiliating compromise. It invited Solidarity to historic round table talks. Lech Walesa found himself negotiating with the regime which had harassed and imprisoned him.

But no-one knew how far things would go.

'We realised it was the beginning of a whole process of change,' says Ana Materska-Sosnowska, from the University of Warsaw. 'There won't be this traditional eastern communist bloc. We just weren't aware how it would happen so fast. You must remember that even in the late 1980s Eric Honecker [the East German communist leader] wanted to invade Poland to stop the reforms.'

In June 1989, Solidarity swept to power in the first ever free elections in a communist country. It was a full five months before the Berlin Wall came down.

Today Poles feel somewhat overshadowed by the Berlin Wall celebrations. 'What took ten days in Czechoslovakia, and ten months in Hungary took ten years in Poland,' says Jaroslaw Kurski, a former Solidarity activist and today deputy editor of Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. 'But the key thing was that revolution happened without a blood sacrifice, there was no broken glass.'

But it is enormously satisfying for someone like Zbigniew Bujak, the former electrician today doing a PhD in philosophy, to watch events in Berlin.

'There was a big sense of euphoria and joy when I was watching the Berlin Wall come down. I realised that for countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but also the Baltic countries, that strategic change could only come for them once the Wall came down, and that once the Wall came down a whole new era could begin. Without the Wall coming down it wouldn't have been possible for Poland to join NATO or the EU, so the real geo-political change happened there.'

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Tony Connelly, RTÉ Europe Correspondent.

'Don't Mention The Wars: A Journey Through European Steretoypes,' by Tony Connelly is published this month by New Island Books.