On Feb. 13, 1985, I stood in the Theaterplatz in Dresden listening to Erich Honecker give a speech. The speech was not simply one of those standard commie stemwinders to which those of us reporting from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were accustomed. For one thing, we were gathered outside the newly restored Semper Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper in 1841, rebuilt after a fire in 1869 and long considered one of the glories of 19th-century musical architecture. For another, it was bitterly cold, at least twenty below zero on the Fahrenheit scale if not colder. For a third, all Honecker wanted to talk about – at great length – was the U.S. missile defense system, then under consideration by the Reagan Administration.
This was odd, because the occasion we – and by ‘we” I mean the western press, opera dignitaries, the local nomenklatura (party bigwigs and apparatchiks), the East German Stasi officers assigned to shadow us, and their KGB bosses – were there to witness was the celebratory re-opening of the great opera house, destroyed for the second time on the night of Feb. 12-13, 1945 “by Anglo-American bombers,” as the commemorative poster helpfully reminded us. (I have my copy, suitably framed, on the wall of my home.) If memory serves, Honecker, however, had very little to say about Semper or the opera house or the work we were about to hear, Weber’s Der Freischütz, which had been playing the night the city was incinerated. Instead, the little party boss – I had run into him in the Bellevue Hotel across the river, where the westerners were staying, and was pleased to see that he was as unimpressive in person as he was on television – went on a prolonged rant about die Sternkriege, the so-called “Star Wars” program that even then was setting off protests among the “peace demonstrators” in western Europe, England and, of course, at home as well.
As we stood there, shivering and bored, my colleague and friend, John Rockwell of The New York Times (who, like me, spoke fluent German) leaned over and said: “Personally, I think Star Wars is bullshit, but it really has these guys scared.” John was right: Star Wars pretty much was bullshit, especially at the time, but it nonetheless terrified the technologically backward Soviets and their satellite marionettes, and it set off the inexorable forces (as Marxists like to say) that just four years later would bring down the Berlin Wall. Reagan was playing poker with a lot of chips but lousy cards, raising the rear ends off the morally, culturally and fiscally bankrupt Soviets.
After a trip to the Soviet Union the following year, writing a Time Magazine cover story about the pianist, Vladimir Horowitz, it became manifestly clear to me what was utterly invisible to the CIA and the State Department: that here was a dying society, which needed only one swift, hard kick to cause the whole rotten edifice to collapse. I even wrote a book proposal about the inevitability of German reunification, which naturally was turned down by every publisher in New York. There were lots of reasons why it wasn’t for them, as the rejection-letter boilerplate goes, but the two principal ones were: a) the Soviet Union would never allow it and, b) the United States would never allow it. Luckily, neither country had a choice in the matter.
That kick came three years later at the Austro-Hungarian border on August 19, 1989. As one of the few foreign countries citizens of the German Democratic Republic were allowed to visit, Hungary was filled with East German holidaymakers that summer, heading for their usual haunts in Héviz and Lake Balaton. But this summer was different. Thousands of East Germans, restive after forty years of misery, economic hardship and outright state-sanctioned murder, had taken refuge in Hungary and on the night of Aug. 19, a few brave souls broke through a barbed-wire gate and fled into Austria. The world waited for the shots that never came. Over the course of the next few weeks they were joined by thousands of others, packed into their little Ladas and Trabants, queuing up at the border, waiting. And when, on Sept. 10, the Hungarian foreign minister announced that the travel restrictions would not be enforced, they breached the Iron Curtain and fled to freedom. At the time my family and I were living in Munich, so it was a simple matter to hop in the car and head for where the action was. Six hours later I was watching and interviewing men and women, falling on the ground in Austria with tears in the eyes, unable to believe that their long national nightmare was finally over.
The last act played out just a couple of months later when, on the night of Nov. 8-9, 1989, die Mauer finally toppled. By the time I got to Berlin, entrepreneurs were renting out sledgehammers. I grabbed one, took my forty whacks and collected my chipped-concrete souvenirs of the ultimate end of any fascist state: one that imprisons its own people lest they learn they have been living a lie. There were gaping holes, through which you could reach out and shake hands with the Vopos, the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) and with soldiers from the Volksarmee. People danced atop the wall, music played – it was the biggest street party in Europe since the Liberation of Paris. A few months later, when the Wall was well and truly down, I had the pleasure of watching my year-old daughter play on the newly cleared ground between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate; where once the barbed wire and machine guns ruled, now a little American girl frolicked in the brave new world that, like her, had so recently been born.
Two years later, the Soviet Union itself fell. Russians don’t play poker, they play chess. Reagan, although no longer in office, had bluffed them. And so, faced with what appeared to be certain ruin, they did what chess players do: they surrendered, to the total astonishment of the American media, Langley clowns, and the striped-pants set. My Zelig-like luck held out til the end: I left the country just two weeks before the attempted coup against Gorbachev, in August, 1991, and by Christmas the USSR was no more.
Twenty years on, how quickly we forget. Some former East Germans openly grumble about the loss of “social cohesion” that naturally attends life in a well-regulated police state, and of course the Soviet Union has never lacked for apologists, either in the cradle or in the grave. To this day, the evil that it did lives on in the form of its fellow travelers – now apparently well represented in the Obama Administration – in its penetration agents and, most sinisterly, in the hidden moles of its continuing “illegals” program (Directorate S of the old KGB First Chief Directorate), which surreptitiously identifies, supports and boosts the careers of native-born Americans – no Boris Badenovs need apply – who are sympathetic to socialism and Marxism-Leninism, and work diligently to undermine their own countries. At the time, I was friendly with one of the KGB’s most famous officers, whose brother ran the illegals program, and he told me that an American illegal had risen to the rank of ambassador. Whether they have had greater success since then is the subject of much speculation. The struggle between liberty and tyranny, to use Mark Levin’s phrase, continues apace, and eternal vigilance really is its price. Whether we still want to pay it is open to question.
Oh yes – the name of the KGB’s principal officer that night in 1985 in Dresden? Vladimir Putin.
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