The ideological earthquake

It was 25 years ago this week that the wall came tumbling down. It didn’t exactly crumble until the bulldozers came to the party, but ordinary folks were able to begin chipping away at it with little danger of being shot down. It made for powerful footage on the nightly television news. No other structure defined the Cold War quite so solidly, and seemingly ineradicably. Back in the early 1960s, when the wall was a novelty, young Germans got killed trying to climb over or dig under it. More broadly, the wall could be seen as a physical manifestation of what Winston Churchill had unhelpfully dubbed the Iron Curtain.
US President John F. Kennedy told his aides in 1961 that it wasn’t “a very nice solution, but a wall is a helluva lot better than a war.” Nikita Khrushchev would probably have seconded that sentiment. Just as the wall symbolized the Cold War, its downfall 28 years later was a crucial juncture in the remarkable transformation that occurred during the latter half of the 1980s, beginning with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to the pinnacle of the Soviet hierarchy in 1985. Gorby, as he popularly became known in the West, was no spring chicken but he was considerably younger than his predecessors and, unbeknownst to most of his colleagues, was determined to drastically shift the status quo. “We cannot,” he had resolved, “go on living like this.” Albeit unwilling to publicly admit it initially, he had realized that the Soviet Union’s claim to being a workers’ paradise was substantially spurious.
The changes this realization entailed included the recognition that it was unrealistic for Moscow to guide the fortunes of its East European allies, and to provide a military solution whenever things went awry, as they notably had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia a dozen years later.
The Soviet Union broadly got away with its interventions in Hungary, Poland and East Germany in the 1950s (although it is worth noting that the re-conquest of Budapest sparked an exodus from communist parties in the West), but its brutal response to the Prague Spring in 1968 was harder to dismiss as par for the course. It was more than a decade later, though, that the Soviet Union made its gravest military error by invading Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular regime. It is seldom noted, though, that the decision was preceded by a considerably more vigorous debate in Moscow than the power structures in Washington bothered with in 2001. What’s more, as the then US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has admitted, there was an American plot to lure the Russians into a war they couldn’t possibly win. It was revenge for Vietnam — even though no one has ever suggested that the Soviets had any interest in encouraging their adversaries to enter Indochina.
At the same time, the Afghanistan factor is all too frequently excessively weighted as a contributor to the demise of the USSR. Sure, it wasn’t just an awkward coincidence. But at a different juncture in its trajectory, the Soviet Union could have survived the blow to its prestige and reputation for military prowess. In the late 1980s, though, it faced a great deal more than humiliation on its southern flank. Under Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies, its internal weaknesses had become all too apparent — not just to the world at large, but to Soviet citizens themselves.
At the same time, the lifting of the embargo, so to speak, on Eastern Europe stirred popular upsurges that broadly echoed the Solidarity movement in Poland, although they were often spontaneous and less organized. In East Germany, the primary impulse was toward an exodus, and even before the Berlin Wall fell young people were seeking a way out via Hungary, which had opened its borders. East German party leader Erich Honecker was more shaken than stirred by the ideological earthquake, and made way in October 1989 for a younger leader, Egon Krenz, who may have been more open-minded but was nonetheless fairly clueless about how to manage the transition. It was a public comment by one of his ministers, suggesting that the border was open — and a consequence more of confusion than conviction — that initiated the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
Once it had begun, there was no stopping it. German reunification followed the next year, and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist in the last week of 1991, its decease hastened by a monumentally misguided coup attempt in August that year by recalcitrant elements in the Communist Party.
As an inevitable consequence, the world shifted on its axis. The Cold War was won largely by proxy, but that barely restrained the triumphalism of those who deemed themselves victorious. They also faced an ordeal, though — the survival of the military-industrial complex required a new enemy to replace the one that had vaporized almost without warning. In time they found one, although it has never been easy to cast it as an equivalent on the global stage. It has nonetheless served its purpose in keeping the wheels of production humming in the arms industry.
The imbalance in international affairs has been harder to cover up, though, and perhaps it is best epitomized by the fact that most of the Moscow’s old allies, as well as several former components of the Soviet Union itself, are now members of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), which really ought to have bitten the dust when the rival Warsaw Pact ceased to exist after all, US Secretary of State James Baker had agreed wholeheartedly with Gorbachev when the latter had declared that NATO’s expansion eastwards would be unacceptable. The ongoing crisis in Ukraine is in several ways a consequence of that promise being ignored by Baker’s successors.
The fact that many East European countries have veered to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum — with Hungary a clear example, while Poland and the Czech Republic have attracted ignominy by collaborating with the CIA’s extrajudicial activities — is one of many unfortunate consequences of the process that acquired unstoppable momentum 25 years ago this week. And the existence, meanwhile, of pockets of nostalgia for the verities of the communist past across Eastern Europe and Russia is a reminder that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, making it necessary for the post-capitalist path to be delineated once more. It’s been a largely unrewarding process so far. It is not inconceivable, though, that shocks to the system roughly equivalent to the demolition of the Berlin Wall could usher in a more constructive phase in the progress of the 21st Century.