Monday marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is worth pausing to recall just how momentous, and unanticipated, this event and those that followed were. My students today have no memory of the cold war; to them, Prague and Budapest, just like Paris and Madrid, are simply places to visit or study in Europe. For the people who lived under communism, however, the system's collapse ushered in an economic transformation unlike any the modern world had ever seen: inflation wiped out the savings of millions of people; unemployment went from being (officially) non-existent to a chronic problem; and homes, businesses, and entire industries passed from state hands to private ownership. At the same time, consumers suddenly had access to goods and services that hadn't been available behind the Iron Curtain, and, for the first time in decades, entrepreneurs were able to start their own companies. Along with these economic changes--at least, in most of the countries--came elections and the potential for democracy, so long denied to citizens in the communist world.
Over the years, my good friend Jacques Rupnik has written commentaries in TNR about the decline of communism in Eastern Europe. Given the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 53rd anniversary of bloody Budapest, Rupnik, a professor at Science-Pol, has written a longish essay for Le Monde, some about the past, some also about the future. Alas, in French.
It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.
The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.
There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.
The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do.
The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944 By Robert Katz (Simon and Schuster, 418 pp., $28) Click here to purchase the book.
The cheer with which Western commentators greeted Mikhail Gorbachev’s tease that the Berlin Wall might come down “when the conditions that generated the need for it disappear” is another sign of how credulous we have become in receiving blandishments from Moscow. It is not only that Gorbachev categorically denied that the Wall “was a result of an evil intention.” He also asked us to acknowledge that conditions in 1961 justified its erection. More than that: since those conditions still exist today, the Wall remains a legitimate expression
