Gorbachev’s urbane, intelligent and highly fluent chief spokesman Gennady Gerasimov appeared on the US talk show Good Morning America – in itself something not long before totally unimaginable. Faced with the practical fait accompli of a new order in Eastern Europe, he was asked about the future of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had laid down that the satellite states did what Moscow told them. With a smile he replied: ‘What we have now is the Sinatra Doctrine. He has a song: “I Did it My Way”.’ The world gasped. Barely four days later the weather had turned and I was stomping my feet to keep out the cold as I stood opposite the tribune erected on Unter den Linden waiting for the display of military might to mark the East German state’s fortieth birthday. From my position on the steps of the State Opera I had a good view of the stony-faced troopers at the old Prussian royal guard-house – since 1945 renamed as the Monument to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism – performing their military ballet, stamping and pirouetting in their jackboots.
But it was Sunday night before it dawned on all of Czechoslovakia that their ‘Velvet Revolution’ had worked and they had taken their celebration to that extraordinary gavotte around their beautiful medieval and baroque city that once again had escaped intact without a fight. The rumours of Soviet tanks massing on the outskirts had proved to be a canard. Gorbachev had not done it in East Germany, he would not do it here. The Sinatra Doctrine was for real. And The Sunday Times foreign editor’s efforts to retrieve his wordy correspondent’s literary artifice were to be rewarded too when historian Martin Gilbert, compiling his History of the Twentieth Century a decade later, included that preposterous piece of prose intact. I had achieved one ambition: I had genuinely become a footnote in history. Within days the Czechoslovak Communist Party had removed the reference in the constitution to its own ‘leading role’ and committed the ultimate political sin of revisionism, declaring that the Soviet invasion of 1968 had after all been ‘unjustified’.
When the counterweights that held the fragile balance slipped, rather than the world exploding, old Europe imploded, fell back into itself and reconstituted its constituent parts. Countries that, in a world divided into West and East, had been written off the mental as well as geographical map, rediscovered themselves and their place in history. At the same time, one of the major players wrote itself out of history. Gorbachev’s humane, logical and fundamentally decent liberalisation policies, famously summed up by his spokesman Gennady Gerasimov as the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’, were inevitably a step too far for some of the more recidivist hardliners in the Kremlin. With Moscow’s Eastern European empire largely liberated, the pressure within the Soviet Union itself, and its fifteen nominally confederated constituent republics, began to build towards boiling point. In August 1991, while Gorbachev was on holiday at a government dacha outside Yalta in the Crimea, a ‘gang of eight’ back in Moscow used the opportunity to seize power.
In the typically dead language of the high Soviet era, he had proclaimed that “the sovereignty of each socialist country cannot be opposed to the interests of the world of socialism.”1 It fell to Gennady Gerasimov, Gorbachev’s sharp-tongued spokesman, who liked to show off his quick wit and mastery of Western culture, to confirm the change. Asked if Gorbachev’s speeches meant that the Brezhnev Doctrine was dead, he joked that it had been replaced by “the Sinatra doctrine.” From now on, the countries of Central Europe could do it their way.2 Gorbachev had visited Beijing in May 1989, an event that had helped to stir the hopes of the student demonstrators there. On June 4, 1989, just as the Chinese were sending the tanks into Tiananmen Square, Poland was voting in its first free elections since the imposition of communist rule. The Polish Communists went down to a catastrophic defeat—and accepted it, partly thanks to the intervention of Gorbachev himself.
On the night of October 9, the East German leadership was on the brink of launching a “European Tiananmen” against protesters in Leipzig. In the end, the leadership held back, partly because of the intervention of civic leaders in Leipzig itself. The other crucial factor was Gorbachev. There were 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany. But when the Soviet leader had left East Germany, he had given firm instructions that they were to stay in their barracks.4 The Sinatra doctrine allowed nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia to reclaim their political independence. But it would be a mistake to believe that the countries of the former Soviet bloc were simply passive recipients of a political gift handed to them from Moscow. The groundwork for the restoration of political and economic freedom in Central Europe had been laid by dissidents, trade unionists, intellectuals, and ordinary people across the region over the previous decade and more.
In August 2010 they took their anti-South propaganda campaign to Twitter, setting up an account—supposedly through their foreign supporters—meant to challenge the South Korean version of events a hundred forty characters at a time. What Barbara Streisand Could Teach Nicolae Ceauşescu In the last few years of the Soviet Union’s existence, its most progressive leaders were fond of touting—half-jokingly, of course—their commitment to the “Sinatra doctrine”: the notion that Central and Eastern European states were free to go their own way, very much along the lines of Sinatra’s song “My Way.” On the Internet, though, Sinatra is out of luck; the buzzword du jour is the “Streisand effect”—the notion that the more you try to get something off the Internet, the more you fuel everyone’s interest in it, thus defeating the purpose of your original intervention.
But in May, Gorbachev’s aide Chernyaev was noting gloomily in his diary: “[S]ocialism in Eastern Europe is disappearing. . . . Everywhere things are turning out different from what had been imagined and proposed.” By October, Gennadi Gerasimov, the Soviet foreign ministry press spokesman, could even joke about it. “You know the Frank Sinatra song ‘My Way’?” he replied, when asked what was left of the Brezhnev Doctrine. “Hungary and Poland are doing it their way. We now have the Sinatra doctrine.”25 At the end of the year, nothing was left: what the Red Army had won in World War II, what Stalin had consolidated, what Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and even Chernenko had sought to preserve, was all lost. Gorbachev was determined to make the best of it. “By no means should everything that has happened be considered in a negative light,” he told Bush at their first summit meeting, held at Malta in December, 1989:We have managed to avoid a large-scale war for 45 years. . . .
As protection for his domestic reforms, he was seeking to decrease defence spending, signing agreements in 1987 to reduce intermediate nuclear forces. The GDR’s National People’s Army was also drawn into planned conventional force cuts. The so-called ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, giving the Soviet Union the right to intervene in eastern bloc states to preserve socialism, most vividly demonstrated in the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968, but tacitly shelved during the Polish crisis of 1980–81, was formally renounced in favour of the ‘Sinatra doctrine’.¹⁷ From now on, each socialist state could do it ‘its way’. In November 1986 Gorbachev told fellow communist leaders that they must rely on their own legitimacy rather than Soviet intervention,¹⁸ and in July 1988 added: ‘Every party is responsible for its own affairs. . . . No attempts can be tolerated not to respect one another or to interfere in the internal affairs of others.’¹⁹ The SED delegation was literally speechless.
In February 1989 the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. U.S.-Soviet talks on nuclear disarmament gathered pace. He created the conditions for the freedom of East European countries that had been in thrall to Moscow since World War II. He made it clear that the doctrinaire communist regimes there could no longer count on Soviet tanks to prop them up. At a Foreign Ministry briefing Gerasimov called this the Frank Sinatra doctrine—they could do it their way. It led to a series of counterrevolutions throughout 1989, in which one communist regime after another in Eastern Europe was ousted. They began in Poland and spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Berlin Wall fell in November, leading to German reunification a year later. Aware that if Yeltsin won a contested seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies, he would have a popular mandate, the Soviet leader set a trap for his most strident critic.
Not only was a climate of reform fostered in other countries; there was also a further, and crucial, element in the new Soviet approach. This was the renunciation of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine of legitimate interference in the affairs of other states which had facilitated the military suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and its replacement by what Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov so disarmingly called, in a press conference in the autumn of 1989, the 'Sinatra Doctrine' of 'letting them do it their way'. In this context, in the spring and summer of 1989 the Page 323 communist regimes in Poland and Hungary underwent radical transformation, inaugurating the whole process of revolutionary change in eastern Europe. After a decade of dealing with economic difficulty and political unrest, the Polish government collapsed, and on 16 August 1989 was replaced by a Solidarity led coalition.
That demonstration would grow exponentially to 10,000 a week later, and to 100,000 the following week. Back in Moscow by then, Gorbachev approved a speech by Eduard Shevardnadze supporting independence for all countries, including those in the Warsaw Pact. When asked on Good Morning America about the speech, Kremlin spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov declared “the Brezhnev Doctrine . . . dead.” When probed on what might replace it, he replied cleverly, “The Sinatra doctrine,” referring to “My Way,” the crooner’s signature song. “Every country decides on its own which road to take,” Gerasimov said smiling. Taking the cue, the East German people did it their way. They summarily ousted Honecker, who was replaced by Egon Krenz, who summarily ousted his entire cabinet. However, none of this was enough for the protestors. For the Wall was still there. 9/11 AND 11/9 WERE seminal dates in modern history.
This principle, formalised following the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, permitted the Soviet Union to intervene against any country within the Warsaw Pact that attempted to change its political or social system. Addressing the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that all European countries were now free to choose their own social and political order and excluded the use of military force between East and West or ‘within alliances’. One of his aides referred to this jokily as the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’, with a play on the singer’s great hit ‘My Way’-countries could now do things ‘their way’. The bizarre contrast between East Germany’s continuing espousal of ‘dinosaur’ Marxism-Leninism and the new spirit of openness and risk in Moscow was shown by the Honecker regime’s unheard-of decision, in 1989, to forbid the distribution of certain Soviet publications in East Germany. Especially singled out for a ban was the monthly German-language magazine Sputnik, which supplied a digest of the Soviet press.
Deng branded them the “dregs of society,” people determined to “establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West,” and sent in the troops. Pictures flashed around the world of torn bodies, crushed bicycles, and a lone, unknown protestor blocking the path of advancing tanks. Repression won in China, but even when Hungary and Poland announced multiparty elections, Gorbachev still resisted Deng’s lead. Following what one minister called the Sinatra Doctrine, he left the Soviet satellites to do it their way. So astonished was the newly elected Polish prime minister that he fainted during his own inauguration. Testing the limits, Hungarian troops rolled up the barbed wire along their border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans “vacationing” in Hungary abandoned their cars and walked across the border to freedom. And still Gorbachev did nothing.