01 September 2009

Paths to 1989

An East German (GDR) policeman patrols the Berlin Wall as workers make it higher.

This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall:  20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.53 MB).

By: Fritz Stern

The breaching of the Berlin Wall on November 9 was the most dramatic symbol of freedom regained in that miraculous year 1989, when in the political life of Central Europe the unimaginable became almost routine. Millions of people in East-Central Europe staged peaceful protests against the existing regimes, and communism seemed to be withering away. Much of the world rejoiced, but for Americans the end of that monstrous division in Berlin had a special significance. For half a century, the United States, consonant with its policy of containment, had in one way or another protected the freedom of West Berliners, as indeed that of West Germans; gradually and reciprocally, former foes had become cherished friends.

We must take a quick look at where that wall had come from. In their common victory in 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had divided Germany into three (later, with France, four) zones of occupation, with Berlin as the seat of an Allied Control Council that was to be responsible for major policies in all zones. The Soviet zone of occupation surrounded the former capital of Germany, and thus Berlin, itself divided into four sectors, became an island in a red sea. Allied unity, already endangered by Soviet moves in Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, gradually ended in a Cold War, an outcome neither side desired, yet with each contributing to its development. By 1948 — after the communist seizure of power in what had held out as a democratic Czechoslovakia — the Western Allies gave up hope that they could successfully cooperate with the USSR in Germany and made what, in retrospect, should be considered prudent preparations for the creation of a West German democratic polity.  When in June 1948 the Allies also supported the introduction (even to West Berlin) of a new German currency, the deutsche mark, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin responded with a total blockade of West Berlin, designed presumably to stop Western plans for a West German state or, at the very least, to impose Soviet rule on the entire city. The United States and Britain, eschewing a military confrontation, resolved on an audacious alternative: to supply West Berlin’s roughly 2 million people by air. The Berlin Airlift was a brilliant demonstration of Anglo-American power, peacefully employed for democratic ends. In this costly process, Americans could count on the fortitude of West Berliners, led by their social democratic leader, Mayor Ernst Reuter, the first postwar German politician to impress the American public.  In May 1949, the Soviets agreed to end the blockade for a token reward. This was a triumph for the Western Allies at a time of weakness in their military deployment: By 1948, most American forces in Europe had been brought home, while the vast Red Army remained stationed all over Central Europe.

Berlin remained symbol and supreme danger spot during the Cold War; it was used as an escape hatch by East Germans who wanted to trade life in their ever more economically depressed dictatorship for a life of freedom and mobility in West Germany, which was then enjoying an “economic miracle” with a socially responsible market economy. (The Western Allies’ help promoted West German recovery, while the Soviet demand for reparations from East Germany further enfeebled that already depressed state-controlled economy.)  President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), for one, understood that this singular open exit, from communist East Berlin to West Berlin, represented a genuine danger to the East German regime, and he also understood, as he said at the time of the Bay of Pigs disaster (a failed, U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba by exiles from the Castro regime) and the fear of Soviet retaliation, that if there were to be a Third World War it would begin in Berlin. Stalin’s successor, the volatile Nikita Khrushchev, also realized that East Germany’s demographic losses were intolerable for the East German regime, which was constantly badgering the USSR to take tough measures to close the opening.

In 1960-1961, the flow of East German refugees grew alarmingly, and it was clear that the drain had to be staunched. On August 13, 1961, the East Germans, finally with Soviet blessing, erected the elaborate, ugly wall that cut the city in half, leaving West Berliners free but hemmed in and often separated from friends and family, and East Berliners permanently unfree behind what in typical double speak was officially called the “Antifascist” wall. The immediate American response was relatively mild, disappointing Willy Brandt, the young mayor of West Berlin, and West Berliners generally. The two Berlins now became rival showplaces for the two rival systems. And West Berlin prospered, continuously helped by American public and private aid and protected by a token Allied military presence. In time, East Berlin emerged from Stalinist drabness, but as to its material well-being — to say nothing of the repression it endured in the Stasi-dominated society — it was a poor if evolving entity.

The Berlin Wall continued to remind Western leaders and many West Germans of the unnatural division of Germany, but they tacitly accepted it and concentrated on the construction of a European Community. The Western powers were content to negotiate for measures to alleviate the many deprivations that the Wall imposed. Détente with the Soviet Union had become the West’s hope, and this policy took different forms. In 1975, the United States, its European allies, and the USSR and its allies concluded the Helsinki Accords. The first two accords confirmed the inviolability of existing borders, thus giving legitimacy to the de facto boundary changes made in postwar Central Europe, while the third part, commonly called the “third basket,” provided that all signatories would respect the basic human and civic rights of their citizens. With the consequent establishment of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), the Soviet Union gained important reassurances. As to the “third basket,” while at first few political leaders on either side realized its inflammatory potential, it is imperative to recall — especially to understand 1989 — that it offered dissident movements in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union moral encouragement and shreds of legal protection.

Soviet tanks had repeatedly crushed violent protests against the regimes in its satellites — in East Germany in 1953, in both Poland and Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But after Helsinki, groups of quiet, heroic, and nonviolent dissidents — as already manifest in Václav Havel’s Charter ’77 in Czechoslovakia — became a much greater force within the Soviet dictatorships. Here were the beginnings of civil societies formed from below, imbued perhaps by the sense of what Havel later called “the power of the powerless.” Admirable and important as these groups were, they alone could not have altered the repressive conditions, however. For that, one needed changes at the top, and that came with the astounding and perhaps historically unprecedented simultaneous appearance of spiritual and political leaders who understood the deadening effects of life lived in stagnation — unfree, uncreative, and impoverished.

Karol Józef Wojtyła — Pope John Paul II — greets a huge crowd in his hometown of Wadowice, Poland, in June, 1979.

Even communists themselves recoiled from the rigid hand of Moscow: In 1975, leaders of Italy’s and Spain’s large communist parties concentrated their criticism of Moscow in something they called “Euro-communism.” In this new mode, the West European communists, who had previously been subservient Marxist-Leninists even during the dominance of its ugliest form, i.e., of Stalinism, broke with some of the party’s basic principles — promising to cooperate with democratic political parties, for example, thus surrendering the previously enshrined dictum that the Communist Party would always represent the sole supreme authority in any communist country. Eurocommunists had already openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  Perhaps, as many conservatives thought, Eurocommunism was a sham, a mere ruse. At the very least, it was a straw in the wind.

Poland, the largest Soviet satellite, had its own history of unique suffering, first under German occupation and then under its Soviet “liberation.” Its earlier history of being partitioned by neighboring European powers had bred its own defiant form of nationalist resistance. Postwar economic misery had sparked open protest against its Polish communist rulers and their despised masters in Russia, the uprisings of 1956 being the most open manifestations of this resistance, as well as strikes and demonstrations in 1970. And still, as in the entire Soviet bloc, repression, backed by Soviet tanks, worked.

Then a dramatic change occurred: In 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Cracow was selected as pope. A Polish pope! Unprecedented in the history of the Catholic Church — and yet another sign perhaps that history had reached a sudden stage of openness. Pope John Paul II, bare of any military power, almost instantly mobilized new hopes among his countrymen.  “Have courage,” he admonished the many millions who, in his first papal visit to Poland in 1979, saw and prayed with him. He became the ultimate moral authority in his country:  a charismatic figure, intensely human and yet fortified by the aura and pomp of the Church.  (I visited Poland for the first time in 1979, a month after this trip. His effect was palpable.)  He wanted to liberate Eastern Europe from the soul-deadening rule of atheistic communism; that he had strong misgivings about Western liberal society became clearer at a later time.

All Soviet satellite states, indeed the USSR itself, were suffering from economic privation and backwardness, and economic discontent was often the igniting cause of protest on the part of peoples groping toward the construction of a civil society. Strikes occurred, but none as portentous as the strike in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk that began on August 14, 1980.  The strike leader, trade-unionist Lech Walesa, summoned from Warsaw, among others who supported the strike, two intellectuals, Bronislaw Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki.  From the Inter-Factory Strike Committee that guided the strike to its conclusion in September, there emerged what amounted to a national political movement, Solidarity (Solidarnosc), challenging the now insecure regime. From then on, Solidarnosc enveloped the country — the first free union in a communist country, governed for the first time in Polish history not by reckless, romantic passion but by political prudence and the absolute rejection of violence. Solidarnosc, workers and intellectuals cooperating, exemplified old social democratic hopes, and for some years those hopes briefly and anonymously held sway. Solidarnosc was civil society in nuce, claiming millions of members and posing a threat to the very existence of the Soviet system. On December 13, 1981, the Polish head of state, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law and imprisoned the Solidarnosc leaders, hoping to expunge the danger. But continued economic misery and the unbroken will of multitudes finally forced the party into concessions, negotiated at a round table beginning in February 1989; the very shape of the table became a symbol of the peaceful negotiations by which, beginning in Poland, communist parties yielded power. Poland’s first semi-free elections resulted in Mazowiecki’s becoming the first noncommunist prime minister in what had been a communist country. (No doubt, the Polish pope was invisibly present in these historic changes.) 

And yet the decisive presence had yet to emerge. In 1985 — after years of senescent Soviet leaders — Mikhail Gorbachev, younger than the other communist leaders and radically different from them, was elected secretary general of the Communist Party. Having grown up in the Soviet system and risen through it, he had intimate knowledge of its crippling defects.  He came to power with radically new thoughts, understanding the Soviet Union’s desperate need for reforms in the economic realm (perestroika) and the civic realm (glasnost). He envisioned a reformed communist Russia taking its place in what he called the “Common House of Europe.” That this broke with communist dogma about the inevitable conflict between socialist and capitalist systems was clear.  Gorbachev understood the power of the United States; he knew that President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) had denounced the “evil empire” and started his ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative; and he had heard Reagan’s defiant “tear down this wall” demand. It is a tribute to both men that, fearful of a nuclear holocaust, they reached important agreements concerning disarmament in 1986 and 1987. Also in 1986, Gorbachev brought the great astrophysicist and civil-rights champion Andrei Sakharov back to Moscow from his internal exile in Gorky, a gesture that was an electrifying recognition of his commitment to human rights. And two years later, he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, reducing the military element in Soviet policy. From the very beginning tacitly and ultimately explicitly, he abandoned the Brezhnev doctrine, which had prescribed Soviet intervention in satellite countries in which the position of the Communist Party was threatened. What opened the road to 1989 was Gorbachev’s hope that the satellites would find their own way to a reformed communism, free of either promise or threat of Soviet tanks.  In the end, Gorbachev failed as a reformer in his own country, but he made possible the liberation of the satellite nations.

The unrest in the Soviet bloc that had become manifest in Solidarnosc made its appearance elsewhere as well, even in the German Democratic Republic, whose orthodox leadership continued to be fearfully suspicious of any liberalizing tendency (to the point of censoring Gorbachev’s speeches). Peace vigils beginning in the fall of 1989 in East German churches were quickly extended to peaceful protest marches in a number of big cities. On October 9, some 70,000 citizens in Leipzig marched peacefully under placards proclaiming “We are the people” and demanding democratic reforms — and they did so knowing that the regime had mobilized troops and given additional blood supplies to local hospitals, and knowing, as protesters everywhere knew, that communist regimes still had the means to liquidate protest; this had been evident in the massacre of Tiananmen Square in Beijing only a few months earlier.

But the people’s wish for freedom was contagious and no longer to be repressed. In June, the Hungarian-Austrian border was virtually opened, and this meant that East Germans, who could easily travel to “fraternal” communist Hungary, now could reach West Germany, via Austria, without surmounting the Wall in Berlin. Other East Germans fled to the West German embassies in Prague and Budapest, determined to remain on embassy grounds until the means to get to West Germany were provided. At obvious risk, East Germans were on the march, either abroad or, even more impressively, on the streets at home.  On November 9, the opening of the Berlin Wall signified the triumph of the first peaceful and ultimately successful German revolution, a triumph perhaps not sufficiently honored by their West German brethren.

By the end of 1989, the satellites of the Soviet Union had been freed. What very few had thought possible — that Soviet rule could actually be overthrown peacefully — had occurred. Historians will long debate what all contributed to this liberation and how, but that it was a concatenation of unforeseeable processes seems clear: I find it tempting to think of it as a silent conspiracy of decency. The events in Berlin were symbol and reality of the triumph of Western and, therefore also, American ideals.

I have only hinted at the subterranean connections, which remain to be explored.  Two hundred years after the great French Revolution, a very different revolution tried to create a new Europe, and for once, by the benevolent cunning of history, the right leaders and brave, prudent citizens appeared simultaneously. Perhaps never before or after was there so much hope in the air, and perhaps it was too good to last. For many reasons, such as the return of violent nationalism, reality in some places very quickly turned ugly and bloody again. But a precedent was set, a successful precedent that affirmed the “power of the powerless.” I doubt that the sparks of those days are extinguished forever: Might one see that under radically different conditions and for radically different purposes, millions of Iranians on the streets of Tehran, demanding a different, better life, are following that precedent?

Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, is an historian of modern Europe, particularly Germany. Recipient of international honors and prizes, he has published widely in the U.S. and abroad; his most recent work is Five Germanys I Have Known (2006). He served as senior adviser to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, 1993-1994, while Richard Holbrooke was U.S. Ambassador there.