Fall of the Berlin Wall: Days of Dissent and Dreams of Democracy

The following article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 Open Society News.

Border crossings, the smuggling of cash and books, support for dissidents to visit the West, nights of vodka-fueled conversation. Open Society Institute senior writer Chuck Sudetic tells of the life and times of Annette Laborey, executive director of OSI-Paris, who in the 1980s helped dissidents behind the Iron Curtain survive and triumph.

Annette Laborey made many forays into communist Eastern Europe. She sometimes visited alone, carrying cash stuffed in her bra for her friends. Sometimes she traveled with her brother in his old Volvo, once with a small printing press he had concealed beneath her seat to smuggle to political dissidents in Hungary. On other occasions, she packed her kids, some of them infants, into a camper van with food and luggage, diapers and bottles, and books and candy, and set off eastward. They passed through border crossings along the Iron Curtain, without drawing the attention of glowering guards. They stopped wherever they wanted. They stayed, ate, and drank late into the night with friends, old and new. All along the way, Laborey expanded a network of writers, thinkers, and artists and helped chip away the totalitarian monolith.

Then, during a return trip to Paris from Poland in the summer of 1981, the halcyon days of Solidarity when there was nothing to eat except in hard-currency shops and restaurants for foreigners, Laborey realized that her mission would soon be accomplished.

"Les jeux sont faits," she said to herself.

"The game is over," she told her program officer at the Ford Foundation. "It may last years, but it is over. Everything is going to change."

The next eight years witnessed the deaths of communist party general secretaries Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, a stifling debt crisis, economic dysfunction, martial law in Poland, winters of no heat and little food in Romania, the fallout from Chernobyl, and Gorbachev's promises of glasnost and perestroika. By 1989, people from East Germany were making their way to Hungary's border with Austria and using wire cutters to snip holes in the security fence to escape. When word spread that no one had shot at them, Germans wielding sledge hammers began beating the Berlin Wall into submission.

Annette Laborey worked for a Paris-based organization that is now all but forgotten except by writers, academics, historians, and other Eastern European intellectuals. The Foundation for Mutual Support Among Europe's Intellectuals (Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Européenne) had its genesis in the Western reaction to communist efforts to co-opt intellectuals around the globe and, during the years immediately after World War II, to coerce independent thinking intellectuals in the countries of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army.

In 1950, a group of intellectuals gathered in Berlin to found the Congress of Cultural Freedom, an organization that took up the cause of liberal thought in the war of ideas against the communist East. With covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, the congress reached out to intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain, sponsoring conferences and renowned literary journals such as Encounter, Preuves, Der Monat, and Tempo presente. In 1966, just before a scandal erupted over its links with the CIA, the congress began funding the foundation. The congress succumbed, but the foundation survived. Supported by the Ford Foundation, and without any government funding, it worked both openly and clandestinely to nurture free intellectual life in Eastern

Europe and, for a time, in Spain and Portugal, which were under rightwing dictatorships. The foundation smuggled books past the thought police. It sponsored conferences and small scholarships that enabled writers, artists, and other intellectuals from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and the remaining East bloc countries-except Albania, which was completely closed off from the world-to travel to the West and, during month-long visits, experience something of life there for themselves.

Laborey managed the foundation from 1975. She traveled into the East bloc developing contacts. She took care of visiting scholarship recipients who came to the West and rolled up in front of her office near Henry Miller's old haunts on the Boulevard Beaumarchais. She perfected the art of explanation and developed the stamina to endure smoke-filled nights and days and nights of vodka-fueled conversation. The vast majority of scholars were not hard-line anticommunists or people desperate to defect. They were, rather, young people who had gifted minds and who would, after exposure to the dizzying choices available in Western supermarkets and libraries, carry home a worldview that no longer squared with the warped image of the West officially propagated in their own countries.

"It was a lot about partying and trying to be normal under very abnormal circumstances," Laborey said. "I got a lot of credit for my capacity to drink vodka from morning to night."

Laborey began her career after graduating from the Sorbonne. Political dissent was growing in Eastern Europe, with individuals and groups in Poland and Czechoslovakia as the leading insurgents. The Helsinki Accords were signed. Charter 77 arose. A dockworkers strike in Gdansk set in motion a chain of events that made Solidarity a household word all around the globe.

One of the foundation's board members, an expatriate Polish intellectual named Konstanty Jelenski, had been involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom. "Through him I had the best contacts in Poland," Laborey said. One of the first was the historian Adam Michnik. "I met Michnik first in Paris, where he had been invited personally by Sartre. He came when I first started and began talking about Watergate. He was a star. Brilliant and fearless."

In Czechoslovakia, the police followed the 1968 Soviet invasion by breaking up most of the country's intellectual circles. Still, Laborey visited Prague and other towns and cities in Czechoslovakia. Once, a Czech historian asked her to bring a specific book, Volume 3 from an important German historical encyclopedia. It had disappeared from every set in all of Czechoslovakia. "I wasn't caught," Laborey said. "I got to his kitchen and, when he saw that book, he literally cried."

East Germany, the East bloc's security and military lynchpin, was even more difficult to crack. "Even the East German opposition believed in the system, that the system was good, but badly applied. In East Germany, I could not avoid informers," Laborey said.

Laborey used émigrés in Paris to establish contacts in Romania, which was ruled at the time by Nicolae Ceausescu. The Securitate, Romania's secret police, stifled dissent with a vast network of informants and the power to punish people with beatings, jail, and the loss of jobs, even for family members. Laborey and her friends once ate her notes after a suspicious phone call rang in the artist's studio where they were meeting.

"I met [Eugene] Ionescu, but did not work with him, even though the Securitate said I had. One of my great contacts was Andrej Plesu," said Laborey. "He was in Germany on a scholarship and later in internal exile."

During the 1980s, the foundation helped Istvan Eorsi, a Hungarian playwright and poet, to obtain a placement at a university in Cleveland, Ohio. During the visit, Eorsi used his time to drive to other parts of America-so much so that the university complained. Eorsi's wanderings proved to be a boon for the foundation. During one trip to New York, he visited an old schoolmate, an émigré from Hungary he had not seen in years. He told his friend about Laborey, and later told Laborey about his friend, George Soros.

Laborey eventually met Soros in 1981 and started to discuss financial support for the foundation. When Soros asked how much she needed, Laborey recalled responding, "$10,000." 

 Soros answered, "Well, Annette, think larger."

No more did Laborey have to spend time raising funds. Soros was willing to match the funding that the foundation had been receiving from the Ford Foundation. Laborey now had new resources to expand her work into the Baltic republics and Bulgaria. Through Laborey's connections, Soros gained collaborators in Eastern Europe.

In 25 years, the Foundation for Mutual Support Among Europe's Intellectuals helped nearly 3,000 intellectuals to make visits to the West. The foundation delivered 15,000 books to Eastern countries, including one Volume 3 from a German encyclopedia.

In 1991, Laborey made a final journey from Paris to Poland for the foundation. This time she carried a cache of expensive French cheese to serve at a victory party in Krakow, a three-day-bash for a hundred members of the network she had nurtured during her years on the road. Members of Laborey's network had become leaders of their countries' new political establishment. Network alumnus Andrej Plesu, now Romania's minister of culture and a future foreign minister, was a guest. Two other guests were advisers to President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia. Another had become Czechoslovakia's vice-minister of foreign affairs. One was president of Hungary Television. Four others were members of their national parliaments.

One of the speakers, Leszek Kolakowski, the renowned professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, proposed that the statues of Lenin and other monuments of communism have only their heads removed. He said they should be replaced by the smiling face of Annette Laborey.