National Post ·
FIRST OF FOUR PARTS
In a series leading up to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we asked our contributors to look back at their thoughts on that fateful day, and to reflect on whether history fulfilled the dreams that sprang from the rubble near Checkpoint Charlie.
'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" said U.S. president Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. Some of his advisors were aghast. They thought that saying such things was too shrill, not presidential enough. Reagan knew better. He understood that under the walls of Jericho the presidential thing wasn't to pussyfoot but to sound the trumpet. So he did, and two and a half years later the wall came tumbling down.
Divided Berlin turned out to be the Evil Empire's solar plexus. The first body blow was delivered by the legendary Allied airlift of 1948-49. The audacious coup not only broke the Kremlin's attempted choke-hold on West Berlin, but demonstrated the resolve, ingenuity and technology the free world still had in those days.
Next came the East Berlin riots that made the Kremlin double over in 1953, not because Soviet tanks couldn't easily suppress rioters -- they could and did -- but because they illustrated how the regime's supposed beneficiaries, the workers, felt about the "systematic implementation of socialism," as the Moscow-puppet Walter Ulbricht's slogan had it.
And then, in 1961, came the Wall.
An important thing to remember about the wall is that it was Nikita Khrushchev's, not J.V. Stalin's. The hideous structure encircling West Berlin, the ultimate symbol of communist oppression, wasn't the brainwave of a crazed despot, but of the man who exposed him for being one. Within five years of unmasking Stalin in a "secret" speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, Khrushchev had to build a monument to his memory.
The Berlin Wall grew out of communism's thaw, not communism's ice age. Khrushchev needed it at the perimeter of the Soviet empire for the same reason prisons and prison wardens need walls, for without walls, prisoners walk away. About 3.5 million East Germans did prior to 1961, often simply by crossing into West Berlin. Once it went up, the Wall became tangible Marxism; the Word of communism made Flesh.
Time passed, bringing the Prague spring, the Polish pope, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Walesa, Afghanistan -- no knockouts, but each a solid body punch. Twenty-eight years after erecting the Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev's Kremlin was on the ropes. Unable to protect its solar plexus, it was about to go down for the count. The last pathetic defense of "scientific socialism" was trying to pretend the blows didn't hurt.
In a column I commented on the Kremlin's attempt to put a good face on its own implosion. "Judging by the comments of the top Soviet functionaries," I wrote on November 18, 1989, "the East German exodus to West Germany was a splendid expression of glasnost. The entire weekend of November 11-12, 1989, was just things proceeding in Berlin according to Gorbachev's plan.
"Some people in the West take these comments by Soviet spokesmen almost at face value," I continued. "In this view, Gorbachev had foreseen that these things would happen. He had all but planned them...
"I guess this would have required Gorbachev to say to the Politburo: 'Stick with me, baby, and I'll lose you Poland, Hungary and East Germany, but never mind. Thanks to glasnost, we'll create such paradise here with what's left that they'll clam-our to come back to communism before long.'
"Can anybody seriously believe this?"
Well, the answer is some people seriously believed it --and today, 20 years later, it turns out that they weren't entirely wrong. At least, not as deeply and irrevocably wrong as I imagined 20 years ago.
Within a dozen years after the collapse of a system -- something Poles and Hungarians had gone to the barricades to bring about -- both Poland and Hungary elected governments they could almost have had without the Soviet empire ever collapsing. Simply put, they elected
communist governments, albeit euphemistically named and cosmetically improved.
There's a difference, of course, between electing a government and having one imposed. In Hungary's case, it's also true that most voters regret having put ex-communists in power, and seem ready to throw the bums out. But they did elect them first, not once but twice, in 2002 and 2006.
Hungarians can't explain it. "Nobody I know voted communist," one shrugged, making me think of an old Budapest joke:
Q.: "Why is everybody whispering?"
A.: "Hush! Keep it down! There's a communist in the country and nobody knows who he is."
Electing communists isn't the whole story, obviously. In 20 years Eastern Europe's drab citadels of depression have turned into bright and vibrant cities. But in the bright, vibrant, post-communist streets, ex-communists routinely duke it out with neo-Nazis -- for Nazis are making a comeback as well.
Eastern Europe hasn't laid its ghosts to rest.
Twenty years ago I worried that we may bail out communism with loans, credits and technology. "Dracula may be stretched out in his coffin," I wrote on Oct. 9, 1989. "The trouble is, the West seems ready to give him another blood transfusion." Dracula's victims in the East volunteering their necks to the vampire again, however, surprised me. There's no mystery like history.