The tenth anniversary of world's Great Change

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It is the tenth anniversary of the Great Change.

On the very same day, 4 June, 1989, the opposition Solidarity movement won 99 out of 100 seats in the Polish senate in the first-ever free elections in a Communist-ruled state -- and the Chinese Communist government turned the tanks loose on the pro- democracy demonstrators on Tiananmen Square. As a result, all of Europe's Communist governments fell within two years, while the Chinese regime is still there.

Second-order earthquakes struck Africa and the Middle East, as the collapse of Soviet power produced upheavals ranging from the release of Nelson Mandela to the Oslo peace accords. But for Europe, North America and East Asia, everything changed.

We live in a world redefined by the revolutions, successful and failed, of 1989. In Russia, ex-Communist apparatchiks who pretend to be democrats run post-Communist systems that pretend to be capitalist. In China, capitalist entrepreneurs who still pretend to be Communists run a hybrid economic system and live in fear of democracy. And the rest of the world is free at last to get on with its life.

What happened? Why did some of these totalitarian systems just curl up and die, while the surviving regimes turned into mere mafia organizations, preserving the power structure but ditching the ideology, like present-day China and Yugoslavia? How could George Orwell have been so wrong?

Nothing would please George Orwell more than to know that he was wrong. He wrote his famous novel 1984 in 1948 (he just transposed the numbers), when most people genuinely feared that totalitarian dictatorships were more "efficient" than democratic systems, and were bound to win in the end. Now we all know better, of course -- but it's amazing how little we all saw it coming.

It wasn't completely unpredictable. I happened to be in Moscow in 1987, two full years before the avalanche, and it was clear even then that something was up. The last time I had been in Russia was in 1982, the year Brezhnev died, when the Soviet Union truly still was the Evil Empire. But by 1987 friends were not afraid to invite me into their homes -- and one May day, walking through Red Square, I saw a small Cessna aircraft parked near St. Basil's Cathedral.

It had been flown there by a German teenager, Mathias Rust, as a protest against the Cold War. He had flown all the way from Germany without even showing up on the Warsaw Pact's radar screens, and landed directly outside the Kremlin's main entrance. It was concrete evidence of a larger truth: that the Soviet Union and all of its satellites were just so many dead men walking.

I did not realize at the time that the whole system might be ending, but I at least had the wit to ask a network for some travel money.

Give me the cash to go back for a couple of weeks every three months, I said, and I'll give you a series when something happens in a year or two.

So I commuted to the Soviet Union on a regular basis in 1987- 1990 -- and I had a ringside seat at the greatest revolution of our time.

It was all the greater, both in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the former Soviet Union two years later, for the fact that it was mostly non-violent. But still I wonder how it happened. Why did the Communist empire in Europe go into voluntary liquidation? And why did the same thing not happen in China?

I do have a theory for why Communism, like all the other forms of centralized tyranny, became obsolete at the end of the 20th century. Mass communications have given people everywhere a sufficient volume and variety of information (however distorted and delayed) that they become able to take control of their lives -- and once they realize they can, then within a decade or so, they will try to do so.

Why did Russia and all the rest of Communist Europe succeed, while China failed? People will tell you that it's because of profound cultural differences, but that's just nonsense. There was a "democracy wall" in Beijing well before there was open dissent in Moscow.

The truth is that the Chinese students on Tienanmen Square, copying the wave of non-violent democratic revolutions in Asia in the later 1980s, were the first to take on a totalitarian regime with what are essentially Gandhian techniques. Those techniques did not prevail in China only because the regime still included hardened revolutionaries who felt no shame in killing people in the streets to ensure that their ideas prevailed.

But in Europe the same techniques had a chance, because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and a whole generation of younger Communists had privately decided that they would never again send in tanks to crush popular dissent. When push came to shove, they didn't -- whereas their Chinese counterparts, much older men from the original revolutionary generation, did.

It's a moot point whether Russians are better off as a result. Most other Eastern Europeans certainly are, and there's no doubt at all why.

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Polish Communist leader who jailed Solidarity's leaders in 1981, but allowed the free elections that started the avalanche eight years later, has no doubts. "What pleases me most about the changes since 1989," he said in a recent interview, "is democracy, democracy and democracy."