How The Wall Came Down (Reagan had nothing to do with it)

How Poland and Hungary Led the Way in 1989

By Walter Mayr, Christian Neef and Jan Puhl

Everyone remembers the iconic images from the dramatic breaching of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. But the groundwork was laid elsewhere. The fate of Germany and the rest of Europe was decided in Warsaw, Budapest and Moscow.

By that evening of Nov. 10, 1989, Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyayev had been meticulously keeping a diary for 20 years. Every day, after coming home to his apartment on Deneshny Pereulok from the party headquarters on the Old Square or from the Kremlin, he had sat down at his desk to write in his diary.

After gazing out the window at the Foreign Ministry building, a Socialist Classicist monstrosity built shortly before Stalin's death in the neighborhood where Moscow's coin makers traditionally had their shops, he would write a detailed account of his daily experiences. He focused, in particular, on the thoughts that he could not express at work, where he was surrounded by fellow party comrades: his futile hopes, frustrations and disappointments.



Chernyayev, a close associate of then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, made a short and laconic entry into his diary on Nov. 10: "The Berlin Wall has collapsed. An epoch in the history of the 'socialist system' is coming to an end," the advisor to the president and party chairman wrote on that Friday evening. "Following the Polish and the Hungarian workers' parties, Honecker has now fallen, and today there was news of Shivkov's departure. All we have left now are our 'closest friends': Castro, Ceausescu and Kim Il Sung. All people who hate us."

His tone was not one of bitterness but of deep sarcasm. Chernyayev had seen this day coming for a long time. "It's the end of Yalta and the Stalinist legacy," he concluded.

Let History Pass it By

The motto "Workers of the world, unite!" was still emblazoned on the front page of Pravda, the party-controlled newspaper, lying on the table next to him. A top headline, on that Nov. 10, read "Today is the day of the Soviet police." Pravda had let history pass it by.

t was a completely different story elsewhere in Europe, where people were celebrating with abandon, almost overwhelmed by the images from Berlin showing East and West Germans in each others' arms. "Germany weeps with joy. Berlin is Berlin once again!" wrote the tabloid BZ. The news that Berlin, divided for 28 years, was united had even traveled as far as the remote reaches of the Australian West Coast. German film director Wim Wenders, was on a visit to the region at the time ("I couldn't have been farther away from Berlin than I was at that moment," he said), encountered a hermit living in a cave. "It was early in the morning, and he was dead drunk. He was a Lithuanian and he spoke a little German. He kept drinking toasts to Berlin, speaking in a loud voice in an attempt to drown out the Wagner music blaring from his ghetto blaster. 'No more walls! No more walls! No more walls anyplace in the world!'"

1989 went down in the history books as the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of peaceful revolution in East Germany. That, at least, is the way the Germans like to see it. It was also the way then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl saw it from the beginning. "We are writing a chapter in world history, once again, it must be said," the chancellor said on Nov. 9, in an emotional speech during a state visit to neighboring Poland.But why did it take so long for the Wall to come down? And who actually destroyed it?


Lots more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,657805,00.html

How refreshing to see this truth amongst the din of Reagan fairy tales.

Wow.

started the downfall of this country. With his reaganomics and the bills they passed. And the people he had around him who started changing the face of the real republican party to the joke and violent hating one it is today...That's what he did. And like bush he didn't run the country. I think he was pushed into the direction he took because he was in the first stages of dementia and didn't really know what he was doing. That's just like the republicans. Putting a man up for election and re-election in that state of mind.

I should have said he didn't do anything good.

and his flunkies knew how to distort reality for their own gain.

They actually had to preserve part of the wall until his moment in the spotlight.

Wonder if Sarah saw any of this from her house in Alaska.

The Soviet infrastructure was in tatters. They had a horribly-centralized agriculture system that could not produce, process and distribute to the people. The wheels were coming off the Soviet Union before Reagan took office.

But the RW, thanks to their propaganda talk radio machine spewing the BS 24/7, there are a lot of people who believe Reagan brought down the Soviet Union, largely from his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech.

It shows you the ignorance of the RW. They have been so desperate to hang their hat on SOMEBODY to point with pride to, but have had so many failed presidencies, they had to pull a "Weekend at Bernie's" and make Reagan into something that didn't even remotely resemble what he accomplished.

:boring:

Too bad the Democrats went along with building the legend.

The press let the idiot Reagan get by with incredible lies and blunders so it wouldn't be as obvious he was being manipulated by others. With this illusion of credibility, his administration was able to peddle their trickle-down snake oil.


It's the same today. The right wing perpetuates their myths, so as to legitimize expansion of Saint Ronnie's policies. It has all played out before us, particularly during the past 8 years.