Sergey Radchenko places the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and ensuing massacre in geopolitical context, focusing on Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing just weeks before the event:
The Soviet delegation was stunned by the scale of the protests. “This is a revolution,” concluded Gorbachev’s confidant Yevgeny Primakov, who had been a prominent advocate of rapprochement with Beijing. “Could it not be,” wondered Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze, an official at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, “that we normalized relations with political dead men?”
Gorbachev himself was worried and relieved in equal measure — worried because he had found himself in the epicenter of a national upheaval, and relieved because at least it was not his nation. “Some of those present here,” he told members of his delegation on May 15, “have promoted the idea of taking the Chinese road. We saw today where this road leads. I do not want Red Square to look like Tiananmen Square.”
Jay Ulfelder considers how things could have turned out very differently both in China and in the USSR, where reactionaries in the government attempted to stop Gorbachev’s reforms with a clumsy putsch in August 1991:
That August Putsch looks a bit clowny with hindsight, but it didn’t have to fail. Likewise, the brutal suppression of China’s 1989 uprising didn’t have to happen, or to succeed when it did. In a story published this week in the New York Times, Andrew Jacobs and Chris Buckley describe the uncertainty of Chinese policy toward the uprising and the disunity of the armed forces tasked with executing it—and, eventually, the protesters in Tiananmen Square.
“At the time,” Jacobs and Buckley write, “few in the military wanted to take direct responsibility for the decision to fire on civilians. Even as troops pressed into Beijing, they were given vague, confusing instructions about what to do, and some commanders sought reassurances that they would not be required to shoot.” Seven senior commanders signed a petition calling on political leaders to withdraw the troops. Those leaders responded by disconnecting many of the special phones those commanders used to communicate with each other. When troops were finally given orders to retake the square “at any cost,” some commanders ignored them. At least one pretended that his battalion’s radio had malfunctioned.
As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan show in their study of civil resistance, nonviolent uprisings are much more likely to succeed when they prompt defections by security forces. The Tiananmen uprising was crushed, but history could have slipped in many other directions. And it still can.
The Dish 