The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

A year later, Gorbachev had personally assured both the Hungarian Prime Minister and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party that the Soviet Union was no longer in favor of using force to impose its will on Hungary. Something else had happened: a promise from the Hungarian government to allow the exhumation, identification and reburial of Nagy’s remains, which had been long hidden in order to keep his grave from becoming a shrine. The government’s official position on the events of 1956 changed as well. It was no longer referred to as a “counter-revolution” but instead as a “popular uprising.”

Honecker and Ceausescu were beside themselves, demanding that Gorbachev intervene in both Poland and Hungary. Gorbachev’s answer was unambiguous, telling them that “those who are afraid had better hold on because perestroika has only just begun.”

The border between Austria and Hungary would be temporarily opened on the afternoon of August 19, 1989 near the town of Sopron, exactly where the electrified fencing between the two nations had been taken down. A ceremonial gate would be constructed and its doors opened, with delegations from both countries then crossing the border in a demonstration of support for freedom of movement.

Within less than a year the Communists went from controlling every aspect of Polish society, having all the parliamentary seats and all the guns, to nonexistence, with the Polish United Workers’ Party officially dissolving itself in January of 1990. By the end of 1990 Jaruzelski resigned from the presidency and officially handed the office over to Lech Walesa. The Communists never again regained a foothold on power in Poland.

In between East Germany and Hungary, both geographically and politically, stood Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakian leader Milos Jakes had temporarily closed his border with the GDR to make it more difficult for East Germans to use his country as a throughway to Hungary and then to the West. Now he had a problem with all the East Germans left remaining in Prague.

It took the West Germans some effort to persuade the refugees to trust them. Soon, in an almost perfect inversion of World War II, train-cars packed full of refugees began to be deported from East Germany—except in this case they were making their way west, and to freedom.

It was Helmut Hackenburg, second secretary of the Party district leadership, who finally made the call, both figuratively and literally. He decided that there would be no force used. He eventually connected with Honecker’s second-in-command Egon Krenz on the phone and got him to agree. All the government forces in Leipzig were told “to take no active action against persons if there were no anti-state activities and attacks against security forces, objects and facilities.”

The next morning the East German Communist Party leadership had a meeting. Just as had been planned, Prime Minister Willi Stoph interjected as soon as everyone was called to order. “I suggest a new first item be placed on the agenda,” he said. “It is the release of Erich Honecker from his duties as General Secretary, and the election of Egon Krenz in his place.”

The new East German leader had two big items to discuss. First, he had learned that the GDR’s finances were completely disastrous. A majority of the machines being used industrially were write-offs, meaning that the cost to repair them outweighed any benefit.[dlxx] Worse, East Germany was days away from defaulting on interest payments on foreign loans.

Prague, on the other hand, had followed Hungary’s lead and simply opened their own border to West Germany in order to get all the refugees off their hands. Within three days over fifty thousand East Germans drove their way to the West via Czechoslovakia. It was like a dam had been breached and now a second hole had burst open.

In other words, the propaganda chief of East Germany announced live on camera that East Berliners were free to leave to West Berlin without any fear of repercussions.

Jager made an executive decision: he ordered his men to open the gate. One hour later, unaware of what had happened at Bornholmer Strasse, border guard commander Gunter Moll independently made the same decision at the notorious Checkpoint Charlie crossing.

The citizens of the GDR were greeted in West Berlin with flowers and champagne by their fellow Germans. By midnight all six checkpoints were wide open, with all 12,000 border guards sent back to their barracks. Soon the entire world was watching in shock as residents of a united Berlin were literally dancing atop the Berlin Wall.

“You made the right decision because how could you shoot Germans who walk across the border to meet other Germans?” he said. Gorbachev still didn’t quite realize that it hadn’t really been Krenz’s decision so much as a historic accident on Schabowski’s part.

There were, in reality, two students by the name of Martin Smid studying at Prague’s Charles University at that time, and the government swiftly produced them both to demonstrate that they were perfectly safe and unharmed. After over four decades of communist rule, the authorities actually were telling the truth—and after over four decades of communist rule, the people did not believe them.

There was just one problem: the People’s Militia refused to take up arms against their countrymen, especially the students. That was enough for Vaclavik. He went on television that very evening and let the citizenry know that the army would not fight them.

It was instantly clear—as it had been in that crucial vote in Poland—that virtually all the workers were on the side of the protestors and against the Communists. The television anchor who delivered news of the strike simultaneously announced that he was joining it.[dlxxxvi] The Communist Party officially abandoned power the very next day.

By the end of 1989, Havel would be officially sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia while Dubcek became chairman of the parliament. They did not seek vengeance for the former Communist leaders. Additionally, all five of the Warsaw Pact nations who had taken part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia now officially renounced and condemned their past actions. The Velvet Revolution ended in forgiveness and peace.

Parliamentary elections in East Germany resulted in the former Communists placing a respectable third place, setting the stage for German reunification on October 3, 1990.

Used to following orders from the dictator, the Romanian army waited in their barracks as the unrest spread. The next day Ceausescu tried to pin the blame on the unrest on Defence Minister Vasile Milea and fired the man, who then shot himself.

Claims that Milea was responsible for the unrest fell on deaf ears. For decades the Romanian people had been told, constantly told, that it was Ceausescu who was responsible for their country and what happened in it. Accusing a scapegoat was an absurdity. If anything, Milea was seen as yet another Ceausescu victim. Hearing what happened to him made the armed forces take sides with the people.

The prosecutors charged the couple with genocide, organizing armed action against the people and the state, the destruction of public assets and buildings, sabotage of the national economy, and attempting to flee the country with funds of more than US$1billion deposited in foreign banks.

It was only when the Ceausescus were taken outside to the school courtyard—and not to some helicopter waiting to return them to Bucharest—that the two of them realized what was about to happen. “Look,” Elena said, “they’re going to shoot us like dogs.” The couple were placed up against the wall, and then the waiting soldiers proved the bitch correct. There were over one hundred bullets shot in total by the time they stopped firing their AK-47s at the Ceausescus.

He tried to rally Moscow Party organizations and the Muscovites themselves against these structures, and in my opinion he was right in this attempt. However, from the very beginning he used populist methods to achieve his goal. He would suddenly appear at a factory, take the manager and lead him to the workers’ cafeteria to give him a public dressing-down, acting as if he were the protector of the people and the manager a monster of cruelty.

Yeltsin’s speech was seen less as an act of integrity and more a dishonest act of pride and ambition, throwing people under the bus in order to further his personal standing.

Gorbachev recounted how Yeltsin would later claim he had been mugged and fought off his attackers and “of course, he had ‘tossed them about like kittens’, but still he had received a knife wound. Needless to say, this tale sounded much more heroic. By then, I had already discovered Yeltsin’s talent for fiction.”[dcv] In reality the wound was clearly self-inflicted, possibly a suicide attempt. Gorbachev explained how the doctors said that “the wound was not critical at all; the scissors, by slipping over his ribs, had left a bloody but superficial wound.”

Clinton had received notice of a major predawn security alarm when Secret Service agents discovered Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi. Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House, where he was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza. I asked what became of the standoff. “Well,” the president said, shrugging, “he got his pizza.”

But Yeltsin had ruffled too many feathers, and publicly so. For four hours he was berated by two dozen speakers before admitting his guilt and accepting his dismissal.[dcviii] While he lost his political position, he nevertheless became a symbol of people’s distaste with the Soviet system—the very system Gorbachev was trying to reform and salvage.

When Gorbachev led the way to introduce the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union in 1989, Yeltsin was elected as a delegate with 92% of the vote. He quickly became an oppositional leader in the newfound parliamentary body. It was in that capacity that he visited the United States later that year.

As Yeltsin flew on to Miami he clutched his head in his hands, his brain rewiring itself from decades of being told things that were simply not true. He also understood that those saying such things couldn’t have been just “misinformed,” not to this extent. They were knowingly, brazenly lying, or at the very least completely indifferent to the facts.

And despite Gorbachev’s misgivings, in May 1990 Yeltsin was elected chairman of Russia’s parliament. In doing so he now represented the republic that contained half of the USSR’s population, 76% of its land and 90% of Soviet oil production. The issue with democracy is that sometimes the votes don’t go the way a person would like them to.

Five days after that the Lithuanian government held their national referendum, with over 90% of the votes being cast in favor of Lithuania staying independent. Uncomfortable with the blood that had already been spilled, Gorbachev was against further escalating the situation. Instead, however, the idea of secession was quickly spreading to other Soviet republics.

When the tanks eventually arrived Yeltsin went back down to greet them. In a public display of fearlessness, Yeltsin approached one tank and posed for pictures while shaking the hands of its commander. “Apparently they are not going to shoot the president of Russia just yet,” he quipped.

In the Soviet Union, dark humor was like food: not everyone got it.

Yeltsin was in a far better position than Gorbachev to fight the plot, and he did so with every tool at his disposal. He did not acknowledge the coup’s legal authority and proceeded to govern accordingly. He issued warrants for the arrests of the plotters, declared himself commander-in-chief of Soviet troops on Russian soil, called an emergency session of Russian parliament, and suspended Russia’s Communist Party.[dcxviii] As for the plotters, they sat down to plan for a storming of the White House. Operation Thunder was set to begin at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, August 21st. It seemed inevitable that things were going to turn very violent very quickly.

Grachev had a quick discussion with the head of the air force, and came to the same conclusion as the Alpha Group. “Let’s just sit by our phones,” Grachev decided, “and try to avert any stupidities.”[dcxxi] Thousands of lives were potentially saved because strong men with guns defied their orders, choosing peace over force.

Gorbachev returned to work the following day. In the past forty-eight hours, sensing the chaos in the USSR and fearing a resurgence of Soviet aggression, Latvia and Estonia had both taken the opportunity to affirm their sovereignty as independent nations just as their sister Baltic state of Lithuania had done previously.

On December 8, 1991, the three men issued the Belovezh Accords which decreed that “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is ceasing its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality.” Both Russia and Ukraine, the two most populous Soviet Republics by far, were officially seceding from the USSR.

On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as president of the Soviet Union. At 7:35 p.m., the hammer and sickle flag of the USSR was permanently lowered from the Kremlin. The following day, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—now a government without a country—officially voted itself out of existence.

In politics, the argument is that power never cedes power without massive war and bloodshed—except in those cases when it does, in which case those in power never had a choice and the whole thing was inevitable the whole time. But those in power always have some kind of choice. That is the definition of power, having the ability to make choices.

Within ten years, the Soviet Union went from being a perpetual world-dominating superpower to literal nonexistence, and is now becoming a forgotten chapter of world history, more of a kitschy joke than a cautionary tale.

Millions of people were trapped for decades in countries where human life was nothing, less than nothing, and they knew it. They lived in constant terror from morning til night—and at night they were waiting for the doorbell to ring, in countries where there was no law or any rights of any kind, where basic necessities like food and housin...

The foes of liberty are many and they are powerful—but they are not particularly impressive. They will do everything within their ability to convince others that their might is eternal, that battle against them is pointless and doomed to fail. This is just another one of their many lies.

Does the fact that they supposedly will never give up somehow imply that their opponents should—or does it imply the opposite? Evil people surrender all the time. At a certain point the costs—in every sense of the term—simply become too high. They are not all-knowing—far from it. They are often not even particularly bright. They are not all-powerful. They are men and women, far closer to snakes than they are to gods. They can, will, and have been defeated many, many times.