How Berlin's Wall came tumbling down

On a chilly winter's afternoon at the end of 1989, a scene of the utmost irony unfolded at a small street market in the East …

On a chilly winter's afternoon at the end of 1989, a scene of the utmost irony unfolded at a small street market in the East German town of Weimar. The cold had caused small clouds of smog from the town's lignite fires to gather at ground level. People coughed and spluttered as they browsed the market's offerings. At one stall a long queue had formed and I quickly moved to the front to see what item had attracted the attention of the populace.

I had presumed the queue was for some exotic items, oranges or grapefruit from Cuba or even wine from the vineyards of Bulgaria. What greeted me, however, was a much more remarkable scene. Two dark-countenanced men, perhaps from the Russian Caucasus, were selling small badges bearing the face of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

These were strange times indeed. East Germans were protesting against Communist rule by displaying badges of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

A few days earlier the East German leader, Erich Honecker, had banned the popular Soviet magazine Sputnik. According to the Communist daily Neues Deutschland, Sputnik had ceased to "make a contribution to the consolidation of German-Soviet friendship". It was, instead, providing "distorted depictions of history". German language editions of Pravda and Moscow News suffered the same fate, but in a remarkable paradox were being smuggled into East Germany not from the USSR but from in West Berlin.

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The pernicious doctrines with their "distorted depictions of history" being disseminated by these Soviet publications were strongly associated with Mikhail Gorbachev and were called by their Russian names of glasnost and perestroika. East Germans wanted the same relaxation on repression that was being enjoyed by the citizens of the Soviet Union. What was good enough for the communist heartland, they felt, was good enough for the "German Democratic Republic". Erich Honecker was having none of it. He would rule with an iron hand and keep East Germany safe for Stalinism.

It didn't work out that way. Eleven months later in October 1989 the man whose face appeared on the badges in Weimar arrived in East Berlin for the celebrations of East Germany's 40th birthday. By this time protests had escalated far beyond badge-wearing. Thousands of East Germans were fleeing the country by rail through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the west.

Those young people who had stayed at home thronged the streets to cheer Gorbachev's motorcade through the city. Addressing a huge attendance at the Palace of the Republic that evening he told his audience that change was needed. "All countries are seized by the changes in the world political and economic order; no country can remain indifferent to the global problems and demands of the scientific and technological revolution," he said to loud applause.

Mr Honecker struck a different note. The GDR would solve its problems in its own way. "Proposals intended to weaken socialism will not bear fruit here," he said. Attempts by the West to "sow the seeds of doubt into the minds of the young" were doomed to failure. But the "seeds of doubt" were being sown from the East as well. Mr Gorbachev walked into the middle of a crowd of young people and told them: "Don't panic. Work for change."

A special meeting of the Warsaw Pact countries was held to mark East Germany's birthday. Significantly the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu took an even harder line than Mr Honecker and refused to attend. It is believed now that on the fringes of this meeting Mr Honecker sounded out with Mr Gorbachev the possibility of bringing the Soviet army on to the streets of East Germany to quell dissent as it had been quelled in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1969.

Mr Gorbachev instantly refused. The pictures of his arrival at Berlin, when he exchanged three comradely kisses with Mr Honecker, had abruptly become icons representing the kiss of death for the East German regime. Honecker's refusal to remove the iron hand of repression from his people had caused such a build-up of resentment that when the lid was lifted from the cauldron the energies released were uncontrollable.

The Brezhnev Doctrine, by which the Soviet satellite states had been kept in line by the Red Army and the forces of the Warsaw Pact, had come to an end. It was replaced by what Mr Gorbachev's spokesman described as the "Frank Sinatra Doctrine". The countries of eastern Europe were encouraged to "do it their way".

And do it their way they did. Poland had moved towards democracy, Czechoslovakia and Hungary followed peacefully, Romania violently ousted Ceau cescu, who was executed on Christmas Day. Most dramatically of all, the Berlin Wall came down and the streets of West Berlin filled with the tiny Trabants of the east.

With no ideology separating them, the two parts of Germany moved inevitably towards the unity which exists today. In the Kremlin, Mr Gorbachev looked out over a Soviet Union which remained intact, though fissures were appearing in the monolith, particularly in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Hardline opposition to the Kremlin leadership was stiffening. Gorbachev found himself torn between two factions in Moscow. The one, led by Boris Yeltsin, pushed for faster reform. The other, including a large group of hardliners, wanted no reform at all. Gorbachev stubbornly attempted to play both sides against the middle. In so doing he satisfied neither side and even lost the support of his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Matters came to a head when Gorbachev went to his state villa on the Black Sea at Foros in the Crimea. On Monday August 19th 1991, Russians woke to the sound of solemn music from their radio and television stations. Tanks began to be deployed on Moscow's streets. A hardline coup d'etat was under way, led, ostensibly at least, by vice-president Gennady Yanayev who at a dramatic press conference, his hands trembling from hangover and remorse, announced: "Mikhail Gorbachev has become very tired after all his years in power, and he will need a good length of time to recover his health."

In fact the coup was a shambles. I witnessed tanks festooned with inquisitive small boys on Moscow's inner ring road. Outside the huge crumbling apartment block which housed The Irish Times's Moscow office a small mini-tank was deployed to keep us in check. A soldier sat on its front, his cap pushed back, a copy of the Red Army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda ,in his hand. He had, he said, no ammunition. It left us with little doubt as to how unimportant we were in the scheme of things.

A contact in the Kremlin got a message to me that the Prime Minister, Valentin Pavlov, a leader of the coup, had "drunk himself into a state of collapse". He had to be carried out of his office by security men who were heard complaining of his excess weight.

After three days and three deaths, caused more by accident than design, the coup collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence. But in a way it succeeded. Its aim was to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from power and that is precisely what happened. With Mr Gorbachev under house arrest in the Crimea the initiative had been seized by Boris Yeltsin, who became the hero of the hour in the eyes of Muscovites and of western observers. There was a hint, however, of his authoritarian ways when he brutally humiliated Mr Gorbachev before the Congress of People's Deputies upon his release from captivity.

By the end of that week in August, Mr Gorbachev had resigned from the discredited Communist Party. By the end of the year his power had evaporated completely. A meeting at a hunting lodge in the forests of Belarus between Mr Yeltsin, the Ukrainian leader, Mr Leonid Kravchuk, and the Belarus prime minister, Mr Stanislav Shushkevich, ended with a curt announcement that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist as a geopolitical entity. The Baltic states, which had earlier claimed their independence, had been joined by the other 12 republics of the USSR.

The action was taken, Mr Shushkevich explained later in a BBC television documentary, simply to oust Gorbachev from power. He was president of the USSR and once there was no USSR he would be not be president of anything. Dramatically and unexpectedly the man who had brought glasnost, perestroika and the "Frank Sinatra Doctrine" into existence had become a political nonentity.

His demise will be seen to have been partly his own doing and partly that of his bitter enemy, Boris Yeltsin. For all his visionary qualities Mr Gorbachev was too often a compromiser with the forces of reaction in the hope of maintaining unity within the party and the state. He was often indecisive and frequently a bumbling speaker, who betrayed a lack of ability to focus on the central issue.

The Russians who ridiculed his candidature for the Russian presidency in 1996 (he received 0.5 per cent of the vote) are beginning to think again about his role as president. In the West his reputation remains highly positive, though Western leaders were quick to ditch him in favour of Mr Yeltsin. History will probably judge him favourably on the whole, even though Russians in the main still blame him for most of their current ills.

One fact remains clear. His refusal of Honecker's request for military support ensured the collapse of the Berlin Wall and its string of geopolitical consequences.