Post by lordroel on Aug 17, 2016 14:34:07 GMT
What if: The Berlin Wall did not fall in 1989
Imaginary moment: Barack Obama as he might appear at the Brandenburg Gate if the Berlin Wall still stood. The sign says: 'Attention, you are now leaving West Berlin'
It was the Leipzig massacre, on the evening of Monday October 9, 1989, that decided the future of Europe.
No Westerners witnessed it because the East Berlin regime had efficiently expelled almost every foreign journalist from the country by noon that day, and closed all its borders. Travel to Leipzig itself was impossible for some hours before and for weeks afterwards.
On the previous Saturday night, October 7, the East German government began to shut the country to foreign media, furious at what it said were 'provocations' by Westerners during violent clashes between demonstrators and police in Berlin.
These had followed the appearance in the city of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to make what turned out to be his last public speech at a parade marking the 40th anniversary of East Germany's foundation.
Young people taking part in an official march-past had called out 'Help us, Gorby!', and later that evening there had been several outbreaks of noisy protest, some close to the Berlin Wall itself.
The following day thousands of people gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the vast redbrick Gethsemane Church on Schoenhauser Allee, a few miles north of the centre. Police surrounded the church, using armoured cars and dogs, then staged a mass arrest of those leaving, eventually bursting in to the building and rounding up everyone in sight.
It later emerged that many known dissidents, especially Protestant pastors, had been interned at the same time and placed in rudimentary camps in remote areas. Units of the ultra-loyal Felix Dzerzhinsky Regiment, the regime's palace guard, were seen at several key points in Berlin.
Westerners, including West Germans, were quickly identified, escorted to the Wall and ejected. Even the normally easy access via Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin was stopped 'for technical reasons'.
Telephone lines to the East 'failed' during Monday afternoon. Two Western reporters, trying to sneak on to a Leipzig-bound train at East Berlin's cavernous Hauptbahnhof station, were arrested, taken to the Friedrichstrasse crossing point and literally thrown out of the country.
East German TV abruptly went off the air and was replaced by a powerful jamming signal, employing previously unused technology to black out West German broadcasts.
It was only in the days afterwards, as phone lines and postal services gradually reopened and Leipzig citizens ingeniously managed to get coded or disguised messages through to relatives in the West, that it became clear something truly terrible had taken place, probably on the scale of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Peking a few months earlier.
It would be weeks before the famous short snatch of grainy, soundless cine-film, miraculously made by a brave unknown citizen, was smuggled to Hamburg in the lavatory of a cross-border train. The footage showed tanks and armoured cars opening fire on crowds carrying home-made banners proclaiming: 'We Are The People!'
Careful examination of the footage revealed dozens, including many women, mown down by what seemed to be heavy machine-gun fire, but the light was poor and details unclear. Many could also have been killed or injured in the crush as terrified marchers tried to flee.
By the time the film emerged, the dead had been secretly cremated and their relatives efficiently scared into silence. Human rights groups estimated that as many as 1,000 people died that night, but the nature of the East German state meant that an accurate figure will never be known.
The crisis had moved elsewhere, and the world was not as interested as it should have been. This was exactly what the East German rulers - and their allies in other Soviet bloc countries - had counted on.
Until Leipzig, many had thought a major revolution was about to happen, one that might even have ended with the Berlin Wall coming down. For weeks, protesters against East Germany's miserable regime had been parading each Monday night round the city centre.
They had good reason to do so. The city lived under a permanent cloud of brownish filth and its water fizzed with dangerous chemicals. Life was sad, hopeless and regimented, the people spied on.
Inspired by word of liberalisation in the USSR itself, the East German people were hoping it would be their turn soon.
But their leaders thought otherwise. The ancient communist despot Erich Honecker knew that everything he lived for depended on Germany staying divided, and on the communist Warsaw Pact alliance that kept things as they were.
Like every Eastern European leader, and especially the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, he feared his own people.
He remembered the savage lynchings of Hungarian secret police by the Budapest mob during the brief uprising in 1956. And he was nervous that, if he ever lost power, he would face revenge for his vicious policy of shooting refugees who tried to escape his rule.
Honecker maintained the biggest and most sophisticated repressive machine ever to exist. About 250,000 of East Germany's 16 million people worked full or part-time for the Stasi security police. Thanks to this, plus the quiet expulsion of anyone who caused too much trouble, there was no organised resistance to the regime, apart from a few courageous pastors.
The sudden rush of refugees to the West after the protests, although it resulted in the loss of many valued professionals, also meant that the most active and potentially dangerous opponents of communism were gone for good.
Increasingly frightened by the threat of revolution, Honecker and his secret police chief Erich Mielke used KGB channels to contact other hardliners in Moscow, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia. It was clear that without intervention, Poland and Hungary were on the verge of having openly anti-communist governments.
The dangerous mood had spread to Russia, which had been hit by long strikes in the Siberian coalfields.
Independence movements were under way in the three Baltic republics, where the USSR's main radar defences against nuclear attack on Moscow and Leningrad were sited. The normally liberal Gorbachev had made it plain that they must stay under Moscow rule. There were also angry stirrings in the Caucasus, especially in Georgia.
Intelligence sources claim a meeting had been held in late August, almost certainly in the former Prague monastery used as headquarters by the Czech StB secret police, at which a plot against the reformer Gorbachev was conceived.
The conclave of Stalinist communists, secret policemen and military veterans agreed co-ordinated action was needed to halt and reverse what they viewed as a Western conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet state and establish American control over Eastern Europe.
Here is the little we think we know, pieced together from official accounts and persistent rumours circulating among Moscow dissidents.
Gorbachev's official plane left Berlin's Schoenefeld airport, after a notably chilly farewell from Honecker, late on Saturday, October 7. The official version says the aircraft 'developed engine trouble' soon after crossing into Soviet airspace and landed at a military base outside Minsk around midnight.
There, Gorbachev was surprised to be met by Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB, and General Valentin Varennikov, commander of Soviet land forces.
They informed him that a special meeting of the Politburo had that afternoon removed him from all his official posts, replacing him with a new joint leadership: the former KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov and the Ukrainian Communist Party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky.
Gorbachev was said to have protested angrily, but to have sunk into despair when told that his wife, Raisa, had suffered a stroke at the couple's dacha in the forest outside Moscow.
He has made no public appearances since, and is believed to have been confined to the dacha, in some comfort but forbidden contact with the outside world.
His foreign minister and close ally, Eduard Shevardnadze, was believed to have suffered the same fate. Western journalists and diplomats who tried to reach both men were arrested and expelled. A document purporting to be Gorbachev's 'testament', which circulated for some years, is generally considered to be a fake.
In the general suppression of dissent in politics and the media, a number of prominent figures disappeared from view and were also thought to be under some form of house arrest.
The closure of almost all Western newspaper offices in Moscow, and the increasingly tight restrictions under which foreign reporters and diplomats had to work, made it hard to establish the facts.
Those missing included Boris Yeltsin, the rebellious former Moscow communist boss. Russia's most prominent dissenter, the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov, was said to have died of a heart attack soon after KGB men arrived at his Moscow apartment. His wife, the outspoken Yelena Bonner, was sent back to the closed industrial city of Gorky, the couple's former place of exile.
The invasion of Poland at the end of October took the world by surprise. Neither the Poles, nor Nato, nor any experts had thought the Kremlin was still capable of such ruthlessness.
Several units of the Third Shock Army, normally stationed in East Germany, crossed into Poland by night and moved swiftly into position to back up paratroops, hardened and clearly trigger-happy thanks to recent service in Afghanistan.
The surprise was highly effective, the Polish army hardly had time to fire a shot, and the leadership of Solidarity was swiftly rounded up. A ferocious martial law was imposed in Warsaw and Gdansk.
There was surprisingly little fighting. The Pope appealed for calm, saying nothing could justify further carnage, and that the great struggle for human liberty would continue regardless.
Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush, backed by the other Nato leaders, angrily denounced the measures as 'a return to the coldest phase of the Cold War'. Mutterings against Mrs Thatcher in the Tory party died away as Conservative MPs agreed that the Iron Lady was needed to see the country through this dangerous time.
Mr Bush quite deliberately revived Ronald Reagan's phrase 'an Evil Empire' in his January 1990 State of the Union message. The same phrase would be echoed in Germany in 2009, when President Barack Obama spoke in front of the Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate.
A special Nato summit was held in Brussels, at which the alliance members pledged their unity in support of freedom and democracy. Tanks were moved up to the American side of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and major manoeuvres were held in West Germany.
But, as had happened over the Soviet repressions of freedom in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, the Western nations did not actually do anything. And the new Soviet government responded to the protests by saying stonily that it 'would act according to its interests in its own sphere of influence'.
A miserable, silent peace descended across the entire Soviet bloc. Prominent-dissidents were offered the choice of imprisonment or exile, and mostly chose imprisonment.
The events caused turmoil in the Labour Party, after Neil Kinnock's dramatic 'Which side are we on?' speech, in which he gave his full backing to a strengthening of Britain's nuclear deterrent and Nato forces. The party's pro-CND Left, together with many communist-influenced trade unionists, refused to support him.
The quarrel continued to divide Labour and the unions right up to the General Election of May 1991, in which Mrs Thatcher scored an unprecedented fourth term.
The Labour Party then split into several factions, and was eventually replaced as the main Opposition by David Owen's Social and Liberal Democrats. Dr Owen's convincing Cold Warrior stance helped him score a substantial victory in the 1996 Election - in which Labour was reduced to a small rump concentrated in Scotland and Wales.
Faced with a growing crisis in education, both Norman Tebbit's Tories and David Owen's SLD agreed on the gradual reintroduction of academic selection in secondary schools, and for far more rigorous qualifications for teachers.
The rise in crime also prompted a consensus that police officers should return to regular foot patrol, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, judged to have tied officers' hands, was repealed.
A proposal to privatise the railways was laughed out of Parliament by MPs of all parties.
The other significant development of the time was the collapse of the Provisional IRA, which lost much of its former support in the United States in the new atmosphere, and which was also accused of receiving Soviet backing. After Provisional Sinn Fein's leaders went into exile in Dublin, direct rule was made permanent and a wide-ranging programme aimed at permanently abolishing anti-Catholic discrimination set in motion.
One side effect of the new Cold War confrontation was the abrupt end of reforms in South Africa. The Communist Party dominated the African National Congress, and the Nato powers feared that an ANC government would provide bases and valuable raw materials to the USSR. So they continued to give grudging support to the minority white regime, while pressing for change.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in the spring of 1990, but pro-communist ANC figures were not allowed to return to the country and, despite the 'liberalising' rule begun by F.W. de Klerk, the country was still plagued by violent unrest.
The new Cold War also diverted Europe's attention away from schemes for a 'European Union' and a 'Single Market' as statesmen concentratedon strengthening Nato. A grandiose scheme for a European single currency was shelved indefinitely.
The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which would have led to the destruction of cruise missiles based in Britain, was suspended by President Bush, and the twin bases, at Greenham Common and Molesworth, were retained. A small group of 'peace women', many in their 70s, is still camped outside Greenham Common to this day.
Published on the website Daily Mail.co. with a article called: What if the Berlin Wall didn't fall
Imaginary moment: Barack Obama as he might appear at the Brandenburg Gate if the Berlin Wall still stood. The sign says: 'Attention, you are now leaving West Berlin'
It was the Leipzig massacre, on the evening of Monday October 9, 1989, that decided the future of Europe.
No Westerners witnessed it because the East Berlin regime had efficiently expelled almost every foreign journalist from the country by noon that day, and closed all its borders. Travel to Leipzig itself was impossible for some hours before and for weeks afterwards.
On the previous Saturday night, October 7, the East German government began to shut the country to foreign media, furious at what it said were 'provocations' by Westerners during violent clashes between demonstrators and police in Berlin.
These had followed the appearance in the city of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to make what turned out to be his last public speech at a parade marking the 40th anniversary of East Germany's foundation.
Young people taking part in an official march-past had called out 'Help us, Gorby!', and later that evening there had been several outbreaks of noisy protest, some close to the Berlin Wall itself.
The following day thousands of people gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the vast redbrick Gethsemane Church on Schoenhauser Allee, a few miles north of the centre. Police surrounded the church, using armoured cars and dogs, then staged a mass arrest of those leaving, eventually bursting in to the building and rounding up everyone in sight.
It later emerged that many known dissidents, especially Protestant pastors, had been interned at the same time and placed in rudimentary camps in remote areas. Units of the ultra-loyal Felix Dzerzhinsky Regiment, the regime's palace guard, were seen at several key points in Berlin.
Westerners, including West Germans, were quickly identified, escorted to the Wall and ejected. Even the normally easy access via Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin was stopped 'for technical reasons'.
Telephone lines to the East 'failed' during Monday afternoon. Two Western reporters, trying to sneak on to a Leipzig-bound train at East Berlin's cavernous Hauptbahnhof station, were arrested, taken to the Friedrichstrasse crossing point and literally thrown out of the country.
East German TV abruptly went off the air and was replaced by a powerful jamming signal, employing previously unused technology to black out West German broadcasts.
It was only in the days afterwards, as phone lines and postal services gradually reopened and Leipzig citizens ingeniously managed to get coded or disguised messages through to relatives in the West, that it became clear something truly terrible had taken place, probably on the scale of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Peking a few months earlier.
It would be weeks before the famous short snatch of grainy, soundless cine-film, miraculously made by a brave unknown citizen, was smuggled to Hamburg in the lavatory of a cross-border train. The footage showed tanks and armoured cars opening fire on crowds carrying home-made banners proclaiming: 'We Are The People!'
Careful examination of the footage revealed dozens, including many women, mown down by what seemed to be heavy machine-gun fire, but the light was poor and details unclear. Many could also have been killed or injured in the crush as terrified marchers tried to flee.
By the time the film emerged, the dead had been secretly cremated and their relatives efficiently scared into silence. Human rights groups estimated that as many as 1,000 people died that night, but the nature of the East German state meant that an accurate figure will never be known.
The crisis had moved elsewhere, and the world was not as interested as it should have been. This was exactly what the East German rulers - and their allies in other Soviet bloc countries - had counted on.
Until Leipzig, many had thought a major revolution was about to happen, one that might even have ended with the Berlin Wall coming down. For weeks, protesters against East Germany's miserable regime had been parading each Monday night round the city centre.
They had good reason to do so. The city lived under a permanent cloud of brownish filth and its water fizzed with dangerous chemicals. Life was sad, hopeless and regimented, the people spied on.
Inspired by word of liberalisation in the USSR itself, the East German people were hoping it would be their turn soon.
But their leaders thought otherwise. The ancient communist despot Erich Honecker knew that everything he lived for depended on Germany staying divided, and on the communist Warsaw Pact alliance that kept things as they were.
Like every Eastern European leader, and especially the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, he feared his own people.
He remembered the savage lynchings of Hungarian secret police by the Budapest mob during the brief uprising in 1956. And he was nervous that, if he ever lost power, he would face revenge for his vicious policy of shooting refugees who tried to escape his rule.
Honecker maintained the biggest and most sophisticated repressive machine ever to exist. About 250,000 of East Germany's 16 million people worked full or part-time for the Stasi security police. Thanks to this, plus the quiet expulsion of anyone who caused too much trouble, there was no organised resistance to the regime, apart from a few courageous pastors.
The sudden rush of refugees to the West after the protests, although it resulted in the loss of many valued professionals, also meant that the most active and potentially dangerous opponents of communism were gone for good.
Increasingly frightened by the threat of revolution, Honecker and his secret police chief Erich Mielke used KGB channels to contact other hardliners in Moscow, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia. It was clear that without intervention, Poland and Hungary were on the verge of having openly anti-communist governments.
The dangerous mood had spread to Russia, which had been hit by long strikes in the Siberian coalfields.
Independence movements were under way in the three Baltic republics, where the USSR's main radar defences against nuclear attack on Moscow and Leningrad were sited. The normally liberal Gorbachev had made it plain that they must stay under Moscow rule. There were also angry stirrings in the Caucasus, especially in Georgia.
Intelligence sources claim a meeting had been held in late August, almost certainly in the former Prague monastery used as headquarters by the Czech StB secret police, at which a plot against the reformer Gorbachev was conceived.
The conclave of Stalinist communists, secret policemen and military veterans agreed co-ordinated action was needed to halt and reverse what they viewed as a Western conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet state and establish American control over Eastern Europe.
Here is the little we think we know, pieced together from official accounts and persistent rumours circulating among Moscow dissidents.
Gorbachev's official plane left Berlin's Schoenefeld airport, after a notably chilly farewell from Honecker, late on Saturday, October 7. The official version says the aircraft 'developed engine trouble' soon after crossing into Soviet airspace and landed at a military base outside Minsk around midnight.
There, Gorbachev was surprised to be met by Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB, and General Valentin Varennikov, commander of Soviet land forces.
They informed him that a special meeting of the Politburo had that afternoon removed him from all his official posts, replacing him with a new joint leadership: the former KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov and the Ukrainian Communist Party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky.
Gorbachev was said to have protested angrily, but to have sunk into despair when told that his wife, Raisa, had suffered a stroke at the couple's dacha in the forest outside Moscow.
He has made no public appearances since, and is believed to have been confined to the dacha, in some comfort but forbidden contact with the outside world.
His foreign minister and close ally, Eduard Shevardnadze, was believed to have suffered the same fate. Western journalists and diplomats who tried to reach both men were arrested and expelled. A document purporting to be Gorbachev's 'testament', which circulated for some years, is generally considered to be a fake.
In the general suppression of dissent in politics and the media, a number of prominent figures disappeared from view and were also thought to be under some form of house arrest.
The closure of almost all Western newspaper offices in Moscow, and the increasingly tight restrictions under which foreign reporters and diplomats had to work, made it hard to establish the facts.
Those missing included Boris Yeltsin, the rebellious former Moscow communist boss. Russia's most prominent dissenter, the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov, was said to have died of a heart attack soon after KGB men arrived at his Moscow apartment. His wife, the outspoken Yelena Bonner, was sent back to the closed industrial city of Gorky, the couple's former place of exile.
The invasion of Poland at the end of October took the world by surprise. Neither the Poles, nor Nato, nor any experts had thought the Kremlin was still capable of such ruthlessness.
Several units of the Third Shock Army, normally stationed in East Germany, crossed into Poland by night and moved swiftly into position to back up paratroops, hardened and clearly trigger-happy thanks to recent service in Afghanistan.
The surprise was highly effective, the Polish army hardly had time to fire a shot, and the leadership of Solidarity was swiftly rounded up. A ferocious martial law was imposed in Warsaw and Gdansk.
There was surprisingly little fighting. The Pope appealed for calm, saying nothing could justify further carnage, and that the great struggle for human liberty would continue regardless.
Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush, backed by the other Nato leaders, angrily denounced the measures as 'a return to the coldest phase of the Cold War'. Mutterings against Mrs Thatcher in the Tory party died away as Conservative MPs agreed that the Iron Lady was needed to see the country through this dangerous time.
Mr Bush quite deliberately revived Ronald Reagan's phrase 'an Evil Empire' in his January 1990 State of the Union message. The same phrase would be echoed in Germany in 2009, when President Barack Obama spoke in front of the Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate.
A special Nato summit was held in Brussels, at which the alliance members pledged their unity in support of freedom and democracy. Tanks were moved up to the American side of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and major manoeuvres were held in West Germany.
But, as had happened over the Soviet repressions of freedom in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, the Western nations did not actually do anything. And the new Soviet government responded to the protests by saying stonily that it 'would act according to its interests in its own sphere of influence'.
A miserable, silent peace descended across the entire Soviet bloc. Prominent-dissidents were offered the choice of imprisonment or exile, and mostly chose imprisonment.
The events caused turmoil in the Labour Party, after Neil Kinnock's dramatic 'Which side are we on?' speech, in which he gave his full backing to a strengthening of Britain's nuclear deterrent and Nato forces. The party's pro-CND Left, together with many communist-influenced trade unionists, refused to support him.
The quarrel continued to divide Labour and the unions right up to the General Election of May 1991, in which Mrs Thatcher scored an unprecedented fourth term.
The Labour Party then split into several factions, and was eventually replaced as the main Opposition by David Owen's Social and Liberal Democrats. Dr Owen's convincing Cold Warrior stance helped him score a substantial victory in the 1996 Election - in which Labour was reduced to a small rump concentrated in Scotland and Wales.
Faced with a growing crisis in education, both Norman Tebbit's Tories and David Owen's SLD agreed on the gradual reintroduction of academic selection in secondary schools, and for far more rigorous qualifications for teachers.
The rise in crime also prompted a consensus that police officers should return to regular foot patrol, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, judged to have tied officers' hands, was repealed.
A proposal to privatise the railways was laughed out of Parliament by MPs of all parties.
The other significant development of the time was the collapse of the Provisional IRA, which lost much of its former support in the United States in the new atmosphere, and which was also accused of receiving Soviet backing. After Provisional Sinn Fein's leaders went into exile in Dublin, direct rule was made permanent and a wide-ranging programme aimed at permanently abolishing anti-Catholic discrimination set in motion.
One side effect of the new Cold War confrontation was the abrupt end of reforms in South Africa. The Communist Party dominated the African National Congress, and the Nato powers feared that an ANC government would provide bases and valuable raw materials to the USSR. So they continued to give grudging support to the minority white regime, while pressing for change.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in the spring of 1990, but pro-communist ANC figures were not allowed to return to the country and, despite the 'liberalising' rule begun by F.W. de Klerk, the country was still plagued by violent unrest.
The new Cold War also diverted Europe's attention away from schemes for a 'European Union' and a 'Single Market' as statesmen concentratedon strengthening Nato. A grandiose scheme for a European single currency was shelved indefinitely.
The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which would have led to the destruction of cruise missiles based in Britain, was suspended by President Bush, and the twin bases, at Greenham Common and Molesworth, were retained. A small group of 'peace women', many in their 70s, is still camped outside Greenham Common to this day.
Published on the website Daily Mail.co. with a article called: What if the Berlin Wall didn't fall