by Peter Millar
A month later, on the first anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, I came back to Checkpoint Charlie with a couple of other journalists writing ‘one year on’ pieces. We had driven from Hamburg taking in the creeping signs of Westernisation spreading across the former ‘East’. On the outskirts of Berlin we had detoured around the perimeter of the old West Berlin boundary, tracing the route of the ‘rural Wall’. I had climbed up an abandoned concrete watchtower and tried to imagine myself a guard looking out so see if I could spot one of my fellow countrymen trying to cross from one bit of countryside to another, knowing it was my duty to shoot to kill if I did. Now at Checkpoint Charlie, empty and abandoned and awaiting demolition, we wandered among the old customs sheds, passport control cabins and the ‘holding rooms’ where anyone detained for incorrect documentation might be sequestered. And we committed wanton vandalism: kicking in a few doors, smashing the occasional window. It was stupid, childish, futile and meaningless. But it didn’t half feel good.
* See also Peter Millar’s All Gone to Look for America: Riding the Iron Horse Across a Continent and Back. London: Arcadia Books, 2008
12
Brave New World
And with that, history came to an end.
I wish.
American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that the collapse of communism spelled the global triumph of Western liberal democracy could not have been more wrong. In early 1990, I described the tumultuous events of the previous year as a wave of revolutions that had finally ended a seventy-five-year European civil war. Round One, 1914–1918, had been a furious slugfest, with the heavyweight empires of the old world battling it out, ending with them all battered but one lot more bloodied than the rest. Round Two had been twenty years of dancing around one another, landing glancing blows here and there – Italy’s grab for Ethiopia, Spain’s internecine conflict, the rise of the dictators, Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, and Hitler’s clawing back of the Saarland, the aftermath of the punitive, self-defeating 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty. Round Three, 1939–45, was another no-holds-barred bloodbath, an orgy of unprecedented atrocity that blended almost seamlessly into: Round Four, the ‘Cold War’s’ long slow potentially deadly dance of attrition, that had ended only when one side collapsed of exhaustion.
By the end of course, it was no longer a European war – the hands on the levers of power were in Washington and Moscow (and Russia has forever been a continent unto itself). When the counterweights that held the fragile balance slipped, rather than the world exploding, old Europe imploded, fell back into itself and reconstituted its constituent parts. Countries that, in a world divided into West and East, had been written off the mental as well as geographical map, rediscovered themselves and their place in history.
At the same time, one of the major players wrote itself out of history. Gorbachev’s humane, logical and fundamentally decent liberalisation policies, famously summed up by his spokesman Gennady Gerasimov as the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’, were inevitably a step too far for some of the more recidivist hardliners in the Kremlin. With Moscow’s Eastern European empire largely liberated, the pressure within the Soviet Union itself, and its fifteen nominally confederated constituent republics, began to build towards boiling point. In August 1991, while Gorbachev was on holiday at a government dacha outside Yalta in the Crimea, a ‘gang of eight’ back in Moscow used the opportunity to seize power. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest and a national state of emergency declared. Their plot ran aground on one man, a contrary, ambitious, hard-drinking rock of a man called Boris Yeltsin, who had himself been angling for power by becoming president of the Russian Federation, nominally just one of the fifteen republics under control of the Soviet president, but the one that constituted by far the greatest bulk of the country.
Yeltsin declared the ‘state of emergency’ to be an illegal coup and with his supporters barricaded himself inside the Russian Federation parliament building on the banks of the Moscow River. A huge building architecturally similar to the Shell Centre on the banks of the Thames in London, it was known to most Muscovites by its nickname, ‘The White House’. The putschists sent the tanks in but the level of popular anger and the small army of volunteers, many of them armed, whom Yeltsin had gathered around him, determined to turn the White House into a fortress, convinced them that they could be facing a pitched battle with potentially major loss of life. They backed down, and Gorbachev came back. But it was the last straw for the Soviet Union as he resigned his role as general secretary of the Communist Party, and one by one the constituent republics, having seen that Moscow would not or could not restrain them, declared some degree of independence.
At the time of the coup, I was stuck in London with no possibility of getting into Moscow after all entry to and exit from the Soviet Union had been suspended under the state of emergency. With the quality of the copy we were getting out of Moscow less than up to the drama of the situation and the standards readers expected from the country’s leading Sunday paper, I was called upon to do what Dave Goddard had taught me all those years previously on the night shift at Reuters World Desk; re-imagine it. Wholly familiar with the dramatis personae, as well as the physical stage on which the tragedy was being played out, I sat down late on a Friday night – with a bottle of champagne in front of me supplied by the editor – to turn a series of dry, factual news reports into a gripping narrative of the events that led to the collapse of the world’s second superpower. It was published as a pull-out tabloid insert in the main newspaper, entitled ‘Red Sunset’.
The copy we received from Moscow said things like: ‘Top Soviet leaders gathered for emergency talks in the Kremlin last night’. Not wrong, but I could hear old Dave’s Dorset tones in my ear as I translated it: ‘Convoys of Zil limousines … (that’s it boy, they didn’t get there on foot, did they? You know what they drive, and never in ones or twos either!) … sped over the glistening cobbles of Red Square … (that’s it, it was raining out there last night, weren’t it, and that’s not tarmac, is it? What do cobbles do in the rain? Load of old cobblers, mate, smashing stuff) … and armed guards stood stiffly to attention … (not got pea-shooters in their pockets and they’d hardly be slouching, would they?) … while they passed through the Great Saviour’s Gate … (not the sort of lads to use the tradesmen’s entrance, are they, and that name’s good too, got resonance, that has – see, you just have to use what you know) … into the medieval fortress at the heart of the world’s second superpower. (There you go, lad, you’ll be getting the hang of this soon.)
In fact, the disintegration of the Soviet Union happened more quickly than even we imagined that night. In Moscow statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and other luminaries of the communist era were pulled to the ground. Those few republics that did not declare outright independence loosened their bonds to Moscow in a new ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’. On December 25th, Christmas Day – although not in the Russian church, which observes the Orthodox calendar – exactly two years after Ceausescu was shot, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. Two days later Yeltsin moved into his office as president of Russia. On New Year’s Eve, two years after our party celebrating the collapse of the Wall and the end of the ‘evil empire’s’ dominance in Eastern Europe, we held a smaller, black-tie dinner party at home, the highlight of which was the playing of the Soviet national anthem at midnight and lowering of the red flag. Tongue in cheek symbolism. And a bit of a laugh.
I for one was not celebrating Gorbachev’s removal from power. More than anyone else he had been the sane force that had made 1989 a year of miracles rather than of bloodbaths. He was – and is – both a great and a tragic figure in world history. He tried to reform an empire and ended up overseeing its disintegration. At any stage he could have stepped in and halted that disintegration, though he would probably only have postponed it, and at incalculable cost in human life. The most remarkable thin
g I heard him say was several years after his resignation when he was asked who figured largest amongst his role models. His answer was not any icon from the pantheon of communist, or even historical Russian leaders. Instead he named a much more unlikely individual: King Juan Carlos of Spain. Asked why, he answered simply: ‘Because he too inherited absolute power and chose to give it away.’
The end of the Soviet Union also opened the final chapter in the history of East Germany’s long-time dictator. The ailing Erich Honecker and his wife Margot had taken refuge in a Soviet military hospital in East Berlin after the Wall came down. Fearing that he might be put on trial they subsequently fled to Moscow, claiming asylum. But with the Soviet Union no more, Russia’s new master, Boris Yeltsin, sent him back to the now unified Germany. As he feared he was put under arrest and charged with responsibility for the deaths of a token 192 people shot trying to cross the Wall. But by the time his trial finally began in 1993, he was judged too ill and released on compassionate grounds. He moved to Chile where his daughter lived and died there of cancer a year later.
The former Soviet ‘constituent republics’ now suddenly reappeared on the stage of a world that had forgotten them. My children’s school in south London set up a twinning programme with a school in Tallinn, capital of Estonia, a country that just ten years before would hardly have been mentioned even in geography lessons. The other Baltic republics, swallowed up by Stalin in his devil’s pact with Hitler – Latvia and Lithuania – reappeared, complete with cultures and languages most Britons, perhaps the most insular of Europeans, barely knew existed. Today all of these countries are members of the European Union, which they see not as a bureaucracy imposing silly rules about the shape of bananas (tales mostly invented, exaggerated or misrepresented by London’s sensation-seeking xenophobic tabloid press), but as a community of nations that for all its institutional flaws, is a guarantor of their freedom and independence. Nobody thinks the EU is perfect but there are many new members who have less than warm memories of the potential alternatives.
The events of 1989 changed not just the future but also perceptions of the past. In London the aged remnants of the Polish ‘government-in-exile’ which had fled to its ally in 1939, had for decades been snubbed and ignored by a ‘pragmatic’ Foreign Office that had reached a Realpolitik accommodation with the communist regime in Warsaw. Now all of a sudden here was Lech Walesa, the shipyard electrician become president of his country on a state visit at the invitation of the Queen, going down on his knees before these old men to accept from them the seal of legitimate government they had preserved since the Nazi invasion, and condemning the years between 1945 and 1989 as ‘foreign occupation’.
Berlin today is a city reborn. The scar that for twenty-eight years ran through its heart has been removed with such a fervid haste that there is almost no trace of it left for history. It is not hard to understand: Berliners sometimes feel their city has over the past century had more than enough history, from Nazi capital of most of Europe to bombed and burnt-out rubble, then schizophrenic divided anomaly. They are more than happy for it to be ‘normal’ for a change. Yet history cannot be escaped. In the city centre they have now marked lines on the roads and pavements to indicate where the wall once ran and preserved a tiny section on Bernauer Strasse as a ‘Wall Park’. Perhaps most telling however, is the section on Niederkirchnerstrasse, formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where beneath the surviving fragments of the Wall lie the excavated traces of an older monstrosity: the basement cells of the long-gone Gestapo headquarters. A permanent exhibition there is justly entitled ‘Topography of Terror’.
Just a few hundred yards north the Reichstag building, burnt out as Hitler’s pretext for abolishing democracy, stands restored by British architect Norman Foster as the new home of one of the most flourishing democracies in Europe. Between the two lies the monolithic monument to those who died in the Holocaust.
If the rip through the heart of Berlin has been healed, the stitching in many places is all too evident: the rash of vast modernist skyscrapers around long abandoned Potsdamer Platz: now home to such temples of capitalism as the Sony Centre and Grand Hyatt hotels. Oranienburger Strasse where the Lutheran church ran its information office for the Swords to Ploughshares movement now also boasts one of the most splendid and ornate synagogues in Europe, while there is another in Prenzlauer Berg. Trabants, if they are to be found, are now lovingly preserved collectors’ items, or, more often, turned into novelty seats in trendy nightclubs. The speedy abandonment of everything ‘DDR’ was regretted in the midnineties and replaced by a wave of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East). But that too has now receded as history melds memory and reality, and a new generation emerges.
For too many people in Britain particularly, an offshore island on the literal and psychological fringes of Europe, still belatedly, and not always coherently coming to terms over the lifetime of a generation with the fact that it is no longer a global power, the miracles of 1989 became all too quickly just last year’s entertainment on television. A country that prides itself on not having been successfully invaded by a foreign power since 1066 too readily forgets on how many occasions that has been a close-run thing, prevented only by the existence of a twenty-one-mile strip of water. As a result we have far too little empathy for countries that have for decades lived under alien occupation. We glibly pretend that an upsurge in Polish plumbers is much the same thing. Believe me, it isn’t.
In reunited Germany the sour taste of the years of partition not only failed to disappear overnight but continued to come back over the years like reflux after an indigestible meal. As hundreds and thousands of people did what I did and asked to see their Stasi files, one after another prominent figure from the worlds of politics, sport and culture had their reputation tainted as having been an IM, an ‘informal collaborator’. If the Stasi, with its tens of thousands of operatives, and tens of thousands more ‘fellow travellers’ had a long arm in its prime, it also cast a long shadow in its passing.
I have never sought out Lieutenant Weichelt or Colonel Lehmann or any other of the Stasi officers’ names in my file. There was no point. What would we say? In 1997, however, I did go back to Berlin to meet a much bigger fish from the Stasi rock pool. Markus Wolf was born in south-west Germany in 1923 into a communist-voting family of Jewish origin which unsurprisingly decided in 1933 when Hitler came to power that they would be better off in Russia. He grew up bilingual and returned to Germany only in 1945 with a group of other exiled German communists to take command of the Soviet sector. He became a founding member of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence service which he headed until his retirement in 1986. When the Wall fell he tried to claim political asylum in the Soviet Union, only to be turned down. By 1997 he had been convicted of treason by a Düsseldorf court. He appealed on the grounds that he had loyally served the German Democratic Republic, the country of which he was then a citizen, and therefore could not have committed treason against the Federal Republic, as he was, by default, not its citizen. He won.
An urbane, sophisticated, cultured and highly intelligent man, the reason I was interviewing him in 1997 was that he had just published his first cookbook: a highly readable nostalgic collection of Russian recipes and childhood reminiscences. There was something more than slightly surreal about sitting at one of the new pavement cafés outside the redbrick Rotes Rathaus, now once again City Hall for reunited Berlin, chatting to a man credited with being the Soviet bloc’s most successful spymaster. It was Wolf who had infiltrated one of his own agents into the heart of the Bonn government, a coup which when belatedly discovered led to the fall of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s government. He chose to regale me with far more entertaining stories, notably about how difficult it was to organise security when Fidel Castro paid a state visit to East Berlin, because instead of sticking to his schedule and keeping within sight of his Stasi-appointed bodyguards the Cuban dictator lived up to his reputation by climbing out of hotel room windows to visit whoreh
ouses. Before we parted I had the chance, however, to pull a surprise on Wolf: I produced from my bag the thick lever-arch bound copy of my Stasi file and asked him to comment. He looked uncomfortable for a bit, then shrugged and said that after all, his responsibility had been gathering foreign intelligence, not domestic surveillance. But he signed it for me, anyhow, adding the comment: ‘As a bit of fun.’
But as he knew, as I know, as anyone who ever lived in a totalitarian society will testify, a state that practises constant surveillance of its citizens is no laughing matter. George Orwell, whose mould-breaking novel 1984 was published sixty years ago this year, gave us neologisms that are not only still with us, but expand their resonance year on year: doublethink, newspeak, Room 101, and above all, Big Brother. Orwell described a world in which three competing alliances – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – are forever at war with one another, a war which necessitates their near-total control over their own citizens’ lives; a war of which occasionally maverick citizens doubt the necessity – or reality – but which is convenient for the authorities who rule over them.