The Lessons of the Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall story shows people are key to democracy

by Nina Khrushcheva

History's milestones are rarely so neatly arrayed as they are this summer. Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born. After some hesitation, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's leader, allowed his East German counterpart, Walter Ulbricht, to erect a barrier between East and West Berlin in order to ensure the survival of communism in the entire Soviet bloc.

By that point, East Germany had lost three million people - including many of its most talented - as hundreds each day peacefully walked into the zones of Berlin that were controlled by the United States, Great Britain and France.

And 20 years ago this month, hardliners in the Soviet government attempted to overthrow president Mikhail Gorbachev, who, two years after US president Ronald Reagan called on him to "tear down this wall," had done just that.

Mr Gorbachev's hard-line Politburo adversaries were determined to preserve the decrepit system that the Wall symbolised.

But, in August 1991, ordinary Muscovites stood their ground. They defied the coup makers, and in the end carried with them much of the Russian Army. With their defiance, the coup was doomed.

Berliners never stood a similar chance in the face of Soviet power. Mr Khrushchev had assented to Mr Ulbricht's plea that only a physical barrier would maintain the viability of the East German state.

Mr Khrushchev's response was reminiscent of how he dealt with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a time when he was consolidating his rule and needed to keep Kremlin hardliners at bay.

But five years after the brutal suppression of the demands for freedom heard in Budapest, Mr Khrushchev was not fully convinced of the need to divide Berlin. He feared that his policy of improved relations with Western Europe would be destroyed in the process.

He had placed enormous hope in the Soviet Union's ability to build more positive relations with Europe, particularly after the U-2 spy plane incident in 1960 - when the American pilot Gary Francis Powers was shot down over Soviet territory - had poisoned relations with the US.

While his summit with president John F Kennedy in Vienna earlier in 1961 had done nothing to improve the situation, erecting the Wall in August seemed a defensive act, not a show of force.

Brinkmanship of the sort that took place as the Wall went up is usually the product of a politician desperate to shore up his domestic position. The irony for Mr Khrushchev was that, though the Politburo hardliners wanted the Wall, they included his indecisiveness about it on the charge sheet used to force his removal in 1964.

When Mr Gorbachev allowed the Wall to be breached and then demolished, he alienated the bulk of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union even more than Mr Khrushchev had. Indeed, Mr Gorbachev once told me how Nicolae Ceauescu, Romania's dictator, called him to request that tanks be sent into Berlin to preserve the Wall.

But Mr Gorbachev, though still a believer in communism, refused to maintain the Soviet empire at the barrel of a gun. He was daring the West to recognise and accept that the USSR had truly changed.

By the time the West came to believe that Mr Gorbachev and his reforms were genuine, resentment among his Kremlin colleagues was boiling over. When the West tried to warn Mr Gorbachev that a coup was coming, it was already too late. But ordinary Russians' sudden, unexpected defence of their new-found freedoms, together with the putschists' sheer incompetence, defeated the effort to restore totalitarian rule.Had the Wall not been built would communism have collapsed sooner? Had Mr Gorbachev sent troops to defend it, would communism in Europe ever have collapsed?

These are unanswerable questions. But given that Mr Gorbachev refused to use force anywhere to preserve the Soviet's East European empire, the idea that he would do so to preserve the Wall seems preposterous.

What does seem clear is that, in the end, no wall can hold back democracy - and, conversely, if a country's people don't want democracy enough, no wall is needed to keep it out. The world has Vladimir Putin to thank for that lesson.