Opinion: Cold War

11/06/2014 - 10h14

This weekend (9th November) will mark the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Between its construction in August 1961, and its destruction in November 1989, it was the most compelling symbol of the Cold War in Europe and provided the backdrop for much East-West drama.

In front of the walled off Brandenburg Gate in 1963 President John F Kennedy made his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.

It was also where in 1987 President Ronald Reagan demanded that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev: "Tear this wall down." Curiously I was in Berlin in 1961 before the Wall went up. And again in 1989 before the Wall came down.

In 1989 East German communism was in deep crisis: The emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985; democratization in Poland and Hungary; and most crucially the opening the border between Hungary and Austria when thousands of East Germans poured into Hungary hoping to cross into Austria.

The East Germans then blocked the passage into Hungary, and many would-be refugees packed into the grounds of West German embassies in Warsaw and Prague.

A deal was struck which permitted them to board closed trains for the journey to the West through East Germany. But in Dresden, where Vladimir Putin was stationed as a young KGB officer, thousands stormed the railway station trying to board the trains.

On October 7th and 8th, marking the 40th anniversary of East Germany, Gorbachev visited East Berlin. He embraced Erich Honecker, the East German leader: It was the kiss of Judas.

Gorbachev did not intend to send Soviet tanks to defend Honecker's regime. A mass pro-democracy demonstration took place in Leipzig and Honecker sent elite paratroopers.

But local party officials were not prepared to carry out a Tiananmen-style massacre, and Gorbachev did not send in Soviet troops from the nearby barracks. Honecker was forced to resign on October 18th.

On November 4th over a million East Germans gathered in a pro-democracy demonstration in the East Berlin Alexander-platz, and on November 9th the Berlin Wall was breached: Thousands crossed unimpeded. Two years later the Soviet Union ended.

Erich Honecker fled to the Chilean embassy in Moscow but he was extradited back to a reunified Germany. Ill-health led to abandonment of his trial, and he was permitted to join his family in Chile.

He died in May 1994 of liver cancer. But Margot, his wife, remained completely unrepentant about East Germany: "It is a tragedy that this land no longer exists," she said in 2012.

59% of the residents of the former East Germany agree with her. Especially people over 60. They recall not the repression of the Stassi, the notorious East German secret police, or the Berlin Wall, but the achievements, as they remember them, of their lost communist way of life.

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent in Dresden, is evidently not alone in his nostalgia for the good old days of the Soviet Union, and its communist empire in Europe.