The wall

Sometimes, history just whizzes by, blindsiding us.

In November 1989, I was shuttling between Den Hague and Amsterdam for meetings. One evening, a German friend suggested we go to Berlin. “The wall could come down,” he said.

I was incredulous. The images of the Tiananmen massacre hung in my mind. If things moved too fast, I thought, East German citizens might find themselves confronting Soviet tanks.

My friend was a little surprised at my incredulity. He dropped the phrase “people power,” suggesting that what was possible in Manila was also possible in Berlin. I was still reluctant.

On hindsight, I now know the real reason for my reluctance. I hated cold autumn nights. I found unattractive the idea of standing before a wall through the night, enduring the wind chill while facing down stern East German border guards.

Besides, I told my friend, I had meetings to catch and classes to convene in Manila. Those were flimsy excuses. The fact was, I entirely misread the pace and momentum of events. By the time I landed in Manila, the fall of the wall was top of the news.

In Poland, much earlier, Solidarity took the elections by a landslide. The Hungarian government, in a prophetic gesture, removed the barbed wire fence along its border with Austria, saying the Iron Curtain was history. Every country in Eastern Europe sensed the wind of change. People were in the streets, demanding freedom.

A year earlier, I traveled across the Soviet Union in the interregnum between Breshnev and Gorbachev when a couple of unremarkable octogenarians took power and faded away quickly. It was clear, even to the untrained eye, that the system was dead. The economy was moribund. The Chernobyl tragedy unmasked the sloppy technology underneath the fearsome steel façade that was Soviet power.

From Moscow to Samarkand, people were speaking their minds more freely. They cursed at the socialist system, unmindful of the secret police.

I remember recoiling in horror when a travelling companion, a Pakistani Trotskyist, inspected the empty corridors of the Uzbek presidential palace and then turned to our minders to declare he would be back to bomb this edifice himself. Our minders were not pleased, to be sure, but they probably secretly agreed with my audacious friend.

The presidential palace was, after all, a resurrected edifice from the Potemkin village, an impressive structure meant to mask the fact that the Uzbek president was a mere puppet of Moscow. It was a magnificent throne to sit an impotent surrogate.

I will never forget the Georgian intellectual I met in Moscow. He took me to a Georgian restaurant, saying this is the only place in the city where real food was served. That was true. Georgian cuisine was indeed a relief from the standard fare of meatloaf and potatoes I subsisted on for days.

At the restaurant, without toning down his voice, he declared the Soviet Union was about to crumble. All the nations subjugated since the days of the Tsar will again be free. The Russian empire, even in its communist reincarnation, is dead.

At that moment, I could not imagine the Soviet Union simply crumbling without resort to war. But my host was exuberant. His optimism was infectious.  I was just dazed by the surrealism of it all: sitting in a Georgian restaurant in the middle of Moscow where everyone poked fun at the Russians.

Shortly after my Soviet sojourn, a dynamic young leader named Mikhail Gorbachev was elevated to the premiership by the tired old politburo that could no longer grasp what was happening. Gorbachev quickly launched his twin programs of economic restructuring (perestroika) and political liberalization (glasnost). These programs meant to reconcile the communist party and an increasingly alienated people.

Gorbachev fully understood that reforming his own society would not be possible without relaxing superpower tensions. He negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) with the Americans.

Gorbachev, however, never fully anticipated the great tectonic shifts that would happen, overtaking his own reform programs. Sensing political relaxation, the Eastern Europeans took the initiative, pushing for democratization and making continued subordination to the Soviet Union untenable.

Much more quickly than anyone anticipated, the Eastern European countries broke from the Soviet Bloc one by one. The process, with the exception of Romania, happened without violence.

With characteristic German efficiency, the two countries became one once more. East Germany is now nothing more than a painful memory, an entity produced by armed might alone against the grain of historical identity.

Only a year after the Berlin Wall was torn down, the Soviet Union itself did begin to crumble. The nations subordinated since the Tsarist Empire, negotiated their way to freedom. In a matter of months, the maps were dramatically redrawn.

The redrawing of the maps continued with the breakup of the old Yugoslavia, producing the many new nations we now have. In a sense, the redrawing of the maps continues to this day, with Russia reclaiming Crimea and the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.

The nationalism that united the two Germanys, tore up Yugoslavia and pushed the Uzbeks and Georgians to reclaim independence is the same sentiment that now inspires Russia to reconsolidate. Vladimir Putin, as popular at home as he is distrusted abroad, digs his political roots deep in the Russian soul.

The Cold War is over. Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of perestroika, warned us the other day the Cold War itself could resurrect, driven by nationalism instead of communism. The sage could have a point.

History has its way of defying expectation.