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"1989:
The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe" by
Mary Elise Sarotte
;
Princeton University Press
(321 pages,
$29.95
)
———
As the
huge and growing crowd of protesters paraded around
Leipzig's
main boulevard on the evening of
Oct. 9, 1989
, they viewed with trepidation the forbidding
headquarters of the Stasi —
East Germany's
secret police — looming ahead. "Here is where it
ends," some of the leaders of the march said to one
another.
Instead,
it was the beginning. Neither the white-helmeted riot
police guarding the building nor the troops deployed
behind the cavernous main train station impeded the
crowd, unlike the Chinese troops who had gunned down
protesters in
Tiananmen Square
in defense of a communist regime the previous June.
Instead, the marchers proceeded triumphantly, shouting,
"Wir sind das Volk (We are the people)."
"It
was clear after
Leipzig
in
October 1989
that nonviolence became the order of the day in
Europe
," writes
Mary Elise Sarotte
in "1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War
Europe," a superb new account of the stunning
events of 20 years ago. "This leads to another
surprise in the second half of 1989: like
China
, neither
the United States
nor the
Soviet Union
served as leaders for the events that unfolded. For that
brief but important time, events on the ground mattered
more than superpower actions. Western countries and
institutions ... were basically spectators to the
dramatic upheaval at the end of the year."
In a
cosmic joke on Marx and Lenin, the East German
government all but withered away with shocking speed.
The Berlin Wall, symbol of Cold War division, fell
exactly a month later, on
Nov. 9
. By
Dec. 19
, when West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl
visited Dresden and was ecstatically greeted by an East
German crowd shouting for reunification, it became
obvious to him that the once unimaginable prospect was
already "a done deal." Less than a year later,
on
Oct. 3, 1990
, the formal papers were signed.
While the
essence of Sarotte's argument was detectable even as
events unfolded, it may come as a surprise to American
readers who have long been fed a counter-narrative by
acolytes of
Ronald Reagan
— that the fall of the Wall (and, by extension, the
Soviet Union
and its empire) stemmed from Reagan's 1987 challenge to
Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, delivered at
Berlin's
Brandenburg Gate: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Reagan
was no necromancer, as Sarotte's prodigious and original
research makes clear. While street demonstrations
brought down the Wall, more conventional politicking and
diplomacy dotted the i's in 1990. Drawing on previously
unavailable documents and access to some major players,
Sarotte shows how Reagan's successor,
George H.W. Bush
, and his shrewd secretary of state,
James A. Baker
, played essential roles in encouraging German
reunification after some early stumbles. Their shrewdest
move was trusting Kohl to work out vital details with
the conflicted, embattled Gorbachev — and to provide
the financial underpinning — for reunification and the
withdrawal of the 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in
East Germany
. The Soviet leader's own advisers despaired that he was
selling his nation's patrimony, won in World War II at
the cost of millions of lives, for a mess of pottage;
some would become plotters in the failed 1991 coup
against his successor, Boris N. Yeltsin.
Kohl, who
takes on the stature of a modern-day Bismarck in this
book, may have had an oafish public image (he is the
size of an NFL tackle), but proved surprisingly nimble
and subtle in his diplomacy, if ruthless in seizing
advantage. So skillful was he that Gorbachev would later
lament, repeatedly, that he had fallen into a trap.
Throughout the negotiations over
Germany's
fate, Gorbachev and his aides were guilty of
"failing to grasp what was at stake," Sarotte
writes. "They thought they had more time to sort
out big issues for post-Cold War Europe." But Kohl
realized that "the German train was now arriving at
the station. Either the Germans got on or they let it
go, in which case there would not be another opportunity
during his lifetime," Kohl is quoted as saying in a
British diplomatic document obtained by Sarotte.
It helped
Kohl that the West German economy was at its apogee, and
that he could guarantee billions of deutsche marks in
aid to the Soviets. "Kohl was right to think that
he could buy Soviet approval (even though he would not
publicly use that phrase), but the price was going to be
high," Sarotte writes.
The
squalor that Gorbachev experienced as a youth and even
as he rose through the Soviet ranks led him to want
better for his people, Sarotte writes, citing her 2008
conversation with Kohl's closest adviser,
Horst Teltschik
: "It was not entirely unreasonable to hope that
extensive cooperation with wealthy
West Germany
, traded for unity, could provide help in reaching that
goal."
One might
argue that Sarotte should have spent more time assessing
the impact on East German dissidents of Solidarity's
electoral triumph in
Poland
, which occurred at the same time as Tiananmen and, like
Leipzig
, provided a model for peaceful change. Or that in
examining the legacy of reunification, she focuses
excessively on the
NATO
expansion that it triggered and how this angered and
flummoxed the Russians. Or that she noodles about
whether either side could have negotiated a better
outcome — a dubious speculation.
She also
could have examined in more detail how Russian leader
Vladimir V. Putin, in 1989 a KGB operative in Dresden,
learned counter-lessons, including how to quell popular
uprisings such as Chechnya and how to outmaneuver the
West by threatening to cut off natural gas supplies.
I have a
personal quibble, too. Foreign journalists, Sarotte
writes, "were banned from
Leipzig
altogether" on
Oct. 9
. In fact, I was there, along with a reporter for
London's
Independent and a photographer from Time's
Vienna
bureau.
But it is
the rare diamond that is flawless. This is a work of
coruscating intelligence and inspired scholarship that
brims with provocative conclusions, well-argued and
documented. It will appeal to casual readers and
scholars alike who want to revisit how history turned on
its hinges 20 years ago.
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