The Fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 is an enormous happening worthy of celebration. Last night, I marked the event in New York by attending a special discussion by four U.S. foreign correspondents and a photographer who recorded the historic day in person.
The reporters, including those from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek, described the sense of surprise, the total joy and the underlying fear of reprisal as events throughout Eastern Europe started gaining unstoppable momentum. Borders suddenly opened in one country letting people scrape up a few belongings and race to Austria and then West Berlin as guards who used to shoot to kill didn’t seem to know what to do.
Unfortunately, what marked the unraveling of the Communist Bloc somehow got morphed into a “fantasy” that liberal democracy would churn forward unstopped, according to the participants of the event at the German Consulate sponsored by the Overseas Press Club of which I am a member.
Neo-cons twisted this tremendous victory, actually won by the guts and patience of millions of oppressed people, into some kind of laud for free market capitalism. Ronald Reagan got way too much credit for defeating Soviet Communism when his role was nothing compared to that of Lech Walesa or Pope John Paul II and plenty of others brave enough to demonstrate for freedom from Prague to Budapest to Gdansk.
As Roger Cohen of the New York Times and International Herald Tribune who moderated the discussion put it, can you have material prosperity and true political freedom? In some cases,yes, but look at Communist China where that very question is offering some inconvenient contradictions that the capitalism cheerleaders might find unsettling. There’s more in terms of refrigerators but the government just shut down Twitter when participants talked about real political freedom
For the record, I am also a member of the World Affairs Council of Greater Richmond which has a speaker, a young Time magazine editor, tonight on the same topic. I’m going to give that one a pass and save $20 because (a) the speaker was in high school in California when the Wall came down and (b) his book lauding Reagan’s role in the Wall was trashed by The Washington Post as being ridiculously simplistic.
It is a shame that more people don’t realize what the Berlin event meant. Why, for instance, didn’t Barack Obama attend the Berlin celebrations (Hillary went) while the heads of all Europe’s states were there. Maybe is too young to remember what I do — the “duck and cover” exercises I practiced as a grade school kid in suburban DC as we waited for the Soviets to nuke us. My dad was a Navy doctor in the late 1950s and 1960s and I learned years later that if the Big One came, he had orders to some Appalachian mountain cave while my mother, sister and I got to fry in Bethesda.
The Wall marked the end of billions of money wasted on nuclear bombers, missiles and warheads and one a two and a half war strategy by the Pentagon. The Soviets simply could not bear the cost of such expenditures which is why their empire collapsed. It didn’t have much to do with Reagan although he did help by getting religion about nukes after watching the made-for-tv movie “The Day After” in which Kansas City is destroyed. Being a Hollywood type, Reagan could learn more from movies than from briefing papers and the movie gave him the idea of ending nukes once and for all.
What always amazed me is that the Soviets did little to stop the Wall from coming down. They had intervened forcefully in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956 and in Prague in 1968. They had massed troops but didn’t use them in Poland in the late 50s and again in the Solidarity heyday of 1980-81. Their henchmen, the East German Stasi, the Hungarian AVO and the Polish SB, did it for them.
One reason for the weak Soviet response is that Mikhail Gorbachev still believed he could reform, not destroy, the Communist structure by being peaceful and reasonable. Another is that the Communist Chinese had just had their massacre at Tienanmen a few months before. To be sure, Gorbachev shifted to the right in 1990 and 1991 as reactionaries in the Party and KGB started rolling crackdowns in the Baltics which wanted to be free, too. Using new security troops called “OMONs” they held dress rehearsal for a coup against Gorbachev in Vilnius and Riga. Lucky for us that when the coup came against Gorbachev in 1991, it failed.
I missed that one but was one hand for the second, much bloodier coup against Boris Yeltsin in 1993. When the Wall came down, I was in New York, working as a new editor on the international desk of Business Week. I had just returned from a three-year tour in Moscow and my wife had delivered our first child. We were working day and night trying to coordinate coverage. I don’t remember much about those months. I was too tired.
Peter Galuszka
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