The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The Soviet Union wanted to see Germany neutral—part of neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact; NATO and the new German government, elected after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, wanted to see Germany a full NATO member. In the final agreement, Germany became—or, some might say, remained—a NATO member but former East German territory remained free of NATO military presence. Wörner’s statement, like the negotiations from which it stemmed, had nothing to do with the issue of NATO expansion to former Warsaw Pact countries, because the participants assumed at the time that the Warsaw Pact would continue to exist (it dissolved a year and a half later, in March 1991).40 Putin, who was a KGB officer serving in East Germany at the time of reunification talks, probably understood the contract well, but in his recollection the negotiations were the beginning of “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”—and were part of the story of Western treachery. The message of the Munich speech was that Russia would no longer accept the post-Soviet, post–Warsaw Pact condition.