History looks far less heroic when you find out how it happens. The fall of the Berlin Wall is one of those monumental events that heralded the collapse of communism, the end of the Cold War and the reunification not only of Germany but of a Europe split for 40 years by Soviet tanks.
As we look back 20 years, we think of it as an event planned, plotted and controlled by statesmen, generals and diplomats. In fact, it was a spontaneous and chaotic reaction to events that no one — in the Stasi headquarters, in Western governments or in the Kremlin — foresaw or knew how to handle.
I was in West Berlin at the time. I remember the tensions, the rumours, the wild excitement, the dash across no man’s land of ecstatic East Berliners. I saw the bewildered faces of the Stasi border guards who stood around uneasily under the Brandenburg Gate while hundreds of West Berliners danced atop the Wall. And I remember wondering what on earth they made of it over on that side. And, what, miles away in the chilly east, could the Kremlin possibly be thinking.
Now we know. The Kremlin was utterly bemused. It had long lost control of events, largely because Mikhail Gorbachev had refused to step in. Six days before the Wall fell the Politburo was floundering to keep up. Things were changing by the hour. Half a million demonstrators were preparing to gather on the streets of Berlin, the KGB chief announced. Would Egon Krenz, the new East German party boss, survive, Mr Gorbachev wondered. And if East Germany collapsed, how could he explain this to ordinary Russians? How could Moscow keep the country going without help from Bonn?
Eduard Shevardnadze, the reforming Foreign Minister, came up with the best idea. Why don’t we take down the Wall ourselves? His KGB colleague quickly saw an objection: it would be difficult for the East Germans, who put up the Wall, if we then tore it down. And Mr Gorbachev saw another problem: without the Wall, West Germany would buy up the East lock, stock and barrel.
He also pointed to another difficulty: other Western leaders didn’t want reunification. They couldn’t say so, as this was Nato policy. Instead, they were trying to manoeuvre the Kremlin into vetoing the idea, he told his colleagues.
He should know. Two months earlier Margaret Thatcher had arrived in the Kremlin on a mission: to halt reunification. She trusted Mr Gorbachev. She trusted him to keep her secrets. She asked him to stop the tape recorders and the notetakers. Then she began. “The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe,” she said. Forget what you have heard or read in Nato communiqués. “We don’t want a united Germany.” It would lead to a change in Europe’s postwar borders. “We cannot allow that, because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”
Unfortunately for her, the notetakers did not forget what she said. They performed a service to history. We now know that 1989 was almost as traumatic for the West as it was for the East.
Mrs Thatcher and François Mitterrand could not understand what the Russians were up to. The French especially were horrified. Why had Moscow not done anything to prevent the prospect of a united Germany? Mitterrand and the French Establishment, Mr Gorbachev’s colleagues reported, were having nightmares. One, Jacques Attali, even said that he would go and live on Mars if unification occurred.
But Mr Gorbachev was determined not to fall back on the old response of a wounded Russian bear. He was not going to send in the troops to prop up the old communist dinosaurs. He thought Eric Honecker, East Germany’s unbending autocrat, an “:wub:”. And he naively believed that, if Russia were to allow the demonstrators to overthrow the old dictators, the peoples of Eastern Europe would be grateful.
His naivety is understandable. Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident who first obtained some of the key Kremlin documents, said the problem was that the Soviet leadership never really knew what the masses thought. There was no free press, the bosses believed their own propaganda and the KGB only reported what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear.
When it all turned out differently, the response in Russia was as chaotic and bewildered as it was across the Continent. Events were driving the crowds on to the streets. And communist parties were left with no response, no plan and no authority.
That is what worried Mrs Thatcher most. She was all for freedom. But she liked order, she liked predictability and she liked institutions such as Nato, in which Britain could play a commanding role. The deal at Yalta was that Russia had its sphere of influence and the Western allies had theirs. And that deal had provided — at least for the West — 40 years of stability and prosperity.
The deal had not brought prosperity to the East. And Mr Gorbachev was committed to change. He knew that Moscow could no longer afford to prop up its deeply indebted allies. He had no time for the rigidities of East Germany, the brutalities of Ceausescu in Romania or the corruption of Zhivkov’s Bulgaria. A deep streak of humanity comes through in the picture of Mr Gorbachev revealed in these records. The man who grew up in Stalin’s Russia was determined to end the Stalinism in his own backyard.
He and his colleagues were flattered by the enthusiasm with which he was greeted abroad (“in contrast to the worthless treatment he gets from his own people”, a Politburo aide noted in his diary). The Kremlin must have been amazed at the shouts of “Gorby, Gorby” that rang out throughout East Berlin at the fateful 40th anniversary cebebration. Moscow probably thought it could have it both ways: earn the gratitude of the East by liberalising the system and the gratitude of the West for promoting democracy and human rights. In fact, it reaped only mistrust and suspicion from the leaders on both sides.
It all changed after the Wall came down. Gorbachev began to get cold feet. He was furious at what he saw as triumphalism in the West, especially in Bonn. He complained that America was trying to force “Western values” on the Warsaw Pact. He savaged Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, for pushing the pace on reunification. Things were moving too fast for him as well as Mrs Thatcher. But that’s history. Events have a chaos and a momentum that no one can control.
'Leaked Kremlin documents show that history makes fools of us, especially our leaders'
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Originally Posted by A.J.P. Taylor
