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The idea of enclosing an entire city—or even part of a city—was inconceivable and absurd, so it is little surprise that many people did not appreciate that yes, the East German authorities were laying the literal groundwork for what would later become the Berlin Wall.
Yet there remained—as there always remained—plenty of young men who were more than happy, for decades, to just follow orders and shoot their countrymen for leaving the workers’ paradise. The darkness will always outnumber the stars.
“The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people. The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.”[cdxxii] Roughly 2% of the East German population were informants, an enormously large percentage once one stops to think about it.
In fact this is demonstrably not the case: there is rarely a shortage of people who will trip over themselves to inform on their countrymen without any pressure or even much tangible reward other than some sort of status or a sense of “I’m doing my part.”
cdxxiii] It was an easy way for low-status, obedient people to become more important than they otherwise would have been (in retrospect, an enormous incentive). Many—too many—of the Stasi’s informers weren’t drafted so much as they were volunteers.
But decades earlier the Stasi had their own methods to secretly mark people: radiation. They had radioactive magnets for cars, put radioactive pins into clothes, and had radioactive pellets shot into tires. A radioactive spray could be surreptitiously used on anyone in a crowd, and if used on a floor it could make a target unknowingly leave radioactive footprints wherever they went. These techniques were only later put together because several prisoners all died from an unusual form of cancer, which led to investigators discovering a radiation machine.[cdxxvii]
Margot’s job was to make sure that East German children grew up to be loyal, obedient citizens—or else. Part of her plan was to make sure that the kids had reliable homes to grow up in. Her definition of reliability was, of course, the degree to which parents were in line with the reigning communist ideology. It only took applying for a visa to leave East Germany, even for just a trip, to mark someone as unreliable or downright hostile to the GDR, for example.
The GDR took thousands of kids from “unreliable” parents and give them to good communists to raise as their own. Any further contact between parents and their children was impossible, for they had no idea where their kids went. Sometimes the government wouldn’t bother to wait a week before taking newborn infants away.
The children at Torgau were locked in with no possibility of escape, without any contact with their families, with no hope of someone letting them out of their 65-square-foot room no matter what they did. They knew that if they panicked or acted out or screamed for help that would only make conditions worse. And if they didn’t know, they learned that fact very, very quickly.
Not only could the Torgau caretakers assault the children who were ostensibly under their care, they were permitted to take the children home with them on weekends to use however they wanted in the privacy of their own homes.
In a sense Torgau could be taken as an extreme metaphor for all the people on the far side of the Berlin Wall—or even on the far side of the Iron Curtain. These populations were trapped both literally and figuratively, with no hope of escape, living in countries where human life was nothing, less than nothing—and they knew it.
Brezhnev’s policy was that the socialist nations—and the USSR especially—had an obligation to defend the gains that socialism had made. If a given nation were to turn against socialism in a counter-revolutionary manner, the other socialist nations had a duty to intervene in order to prevent that—by force, if necessary. It was not only Russian citizens who could not escape the USSR: neither could those countries aligned with the Soviet Union.
Her view was that “consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.” As for him: “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic,” he said in 1977. “It is this: we win and they lose.”
Nixon wasn’t the only one in danger. The head of the Watergate hotel burglary, G. Gordon Liddy, had similar concerns to Agnew regarding what the Federal government was capable of. He had been party to White House discussions about the feasibility of drugging Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and of assassinating reporter Jack Anderson.
Then Neave asked a woman: Margaret Thatcher. Her vision was of a Tory party that stood for right-wing principles clearly distinct from Labour’s, with the voters allowed to have a choice, not an echo. Unlike the British political consensus at the time, Thatcher was an advocate of privatization, deregulation, lowering taxes, and reigning in government spending. “Consensus doesn’t really give you any direction in life,” she later said.
A distraught Nancy arrived as Reagan was being prepped for surgery. “Honey,” he told her, “I forgot to duck.” His nonstop wisecracking must have been simultaneously reassuring and maddening, scribbling down W.C. Fields’ quip to his nurse that “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Once in the operating room Reagan took a second to remove his oxygen mask and tell the assembled surgical team that “I hope you’re all Republicans!”
The commissar in the Soviet Union who went out to one of those state collective farms, grabbed the first worker he came to. He said, “How are the crops?” “Oh,” he said, “the crops. Never had been better, just wonderful.” He said, “How about potatoes?” “Oh,” he said, “comrade commissar, if we could put the potatoes in one pile, they would reach the foot of God.” And the commissar said, “This is the Soviet Union, there is no God here.” He said, “That’s all right, there are no potatoes.”
A politician can hardly be expected not to boast or even inflate their accomplishments—real or otherwise—but investing in a personal relationship with Gorbachev ended up paying extraordinary dividends for Thatcher.
Mikhail Gorbachev was born in the Russian village of Privolnoye in 1931. Within a couple of years, three of his father’s siblings would succumb to the famine which killed somewhere between a third to a half of the village. The following year his paternal grandfather would be arrested for not meeting the government’s sowing plan regardless of the fact that he had never been supplied with the necessary seeds to sow.
“I will not press the button even for training purposes,” he said.[cdlxxxi] The two men with the most powerful nuclear arsenals in the world were thus committed to never using them—though neither could be sure that the other felt the same.
The main sticking point between the two was SDI, but their groundwork was clear: a nuclear war was unwinnable and unthinkable, and the two nations would have to do whatever was in their power to make sure that would never happen.
Author Suzanne Massie taught President Reagan the Russian rhyme doverai no proverai, which means “trust, but verify.” It was one of two slogans that guided his thinking in negotiations with the USSR: the two countries would have a basis of trust in their discussions and agreements, but this needed to be supplemented by some mechanism to ensure that each party was holding to its commitments.
You have to wait ten years there for delivery after you order an automobile. And so a fellow had finally gotten the money together and was going to buy an automobile—only about one out of seven families have them in that country—and he went through all the paperwork and everything and finally signed the last paper, laid down his money. And then the man behind the counter said, “Come back in ten years and get your automobile.” And the man said, “Morning or afternoon?'” And the fellow behind the counter says, “Well, what difference does it make ten years from now?” And he said, “Well, the
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American experts had argued whether the USSR was spending 9-11% of their GDP on the military or if it was closer to 11-13%. The actual figure was somewhere between 30-40%. To provide perspective, the United States was spending 35% of its GDP on the military for a brief period during the height of World War II. The Soviets were spending around that much every single year—a clearly unsustainable cost that would be almost impossible to increase.
When he came in to office the top marginal rate was 70%, meaning the Federal government alone took 70% of any money an individual earned over $108,300 (in addition to the rest of a person’s earnings being taxed at lower rates). Reagan left office with close to a flat tax, with no Federal taxes for individual income up to $17,850 and 28% taken out of any income after that.
Earlier in 1986 Gorbachev had given a speech to the Communist Party Congress, announcing a policy of perestroika—rebuilding—in conjunction with the concept of glasnost, or openness. He saw that honest conversations with Reagan and Thatcher, where all parties involved made plain their concerns and goals, allowed for—if not mutual agreement—at the very least mutual trust and respect. Gorbachev did not regard the Soviet Union as it currently stood to be either desirable or sustainable, and the man who occupied Stalin’s chair was in a position to do something about it.
By the early eighties the Soviet Union led the world in such basic economic indices as the production of iron, coal, timber, and cement. It boasted the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam, largest steel factory, heaviest tractors, most powerful rockets. At the same time, industry was unable to produce a decent razor blade or meet the demand for toilet paper.[dxiv]
Much of the Russian population was living under a system of public lies and private truths, wherein they smiled and nodded in public spaces about the gloriousness of the Soviet system before coming home and dropping the whole façade.
Acknowledging the enormous price the Soviet Union paid against Hitler—and reminding the audience that for a time “Britain had to stand alone” against the Nazi dictator—she pointed out how nuclear weapons kept Europe largely free of warfare for decades because the costs of a nuclear exchange would be incalculable.[dxx]
Directly behind the Brandenburg Gate lurked the Berlin Wall and all that it symbolized. Reagan stood in front of an enormous crowd—and an array of television cameras from all over the world—and issued his challenge. “General Secretary Gorbachev,” he said, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
To oppose freedom of choice is to come out against the objective tide of history itself. That is why power politics in all their forms and manifestations are historically obsolete.[dxxv]
The Gdansk Agreement of August 1980 reaffirmed the people’s constitutional rights to freedom of speech and of the press. As importantly, it allowed for the establishment of a trade union not under the control of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party and guaranteed workers the right to strike.
At 6 a.m. on December 13, 1981, the Polish government declared martial law and abandoned even the pretense of a country where law had any meaning. Hundreds of telecommunication exchanges were raided and telephone lines cut in order to prevent what they called “misinformation” from spreading.
Within two years the Soviet military would be reduced by half a million personnel, he announced. Rather than sending in the tanks Gorbachev would be withdrawing them—from East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, in addition to withdrawing tens of thousands of Soviet troops.
To be completely sure that he had permission to proceed, Németh reminded the Soviet leader that the USSR still had eighty thousand troops stationed in Hungary. He didn’t want a repeat of 1956. While Gorbachev said that he didn’t agree with a multi-party system, either in principle or in Hungary specifically, “you can be certain that there would be no instruction or order from us to crush it.”
The USSR had secretly had nuclear weapons in Hungary for years, and Grósz wanted them gone. Gorbachev agreed. Grósz decided to push his advantage. In order to “distance us from the memories of 1956, I put it to you that all Soviet troops should leave Hungary.” Gorbachev agreed as well, but had wanted to hold off to see if he could use the troop withdrawal as a bargaining chip to get NATO forces reduced in Europe as well. As a sign of good faith, hundreds of tanks and five thousand Soviet troops were withdrawn from Hungary in short order. Grósz was dumbfounded—and so was the East German
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President Antonin Novotny released his fury on a maintenance man who was taking a long time to repair an ordinary door lock; he told the worker that he could have done it himself in no time. The maintenance man’s response could not have been any truer for the time: “Well yes, Mister President, because you are a locksmith, but I’m a university professor.”
On the other hand Ceausescu implemented Decree 770 in 1967, which was aimed at increasing Romania’s population by 50%. Proclaiming that the fetus “is the property of the entire society,”[dxxxviii] both abortion and contraception were made illegal for women under the age of forty or with fewer than four children.
Romanian women of childbearing age were given mandatory gynecological exams every month under the supervision of the so-called “menstrual police.” A miscarriage would result in questioning by the authorities, where the traumatized woman would be forced to prove that she had in fact lost her baby organically.
Ghostwritten scientific papers were presented as having been written by the barely-educated woman, and the Romanian government lobbied international publications and organizations to publish “her” work and grant her honorary degrees. The state media could then reasonably speak of Elena as being a world-renowned scientist.
In the countryside, village householders were given short notice to evacuate their homes, which were then bulldozed. They were rehoused in concrete boxes, often with communal kitchens, toilets, and washing facilities. Some five hundred villages were razed in this way, and thousands more were due for demolition. The aim was to do away with “archaic” village life and get rid of the difference between factory and agricultural workers.
Behr noted the consequences of “the sudden power cuts that forced coal miners to climb up ladders in the dark at the end of their shifts or compelled surgeons to abort surgical operations at the last moment.” This was in addition to “infants whose life-support machines were suddenly disconnected” or “the patients whose iron lungs suddenly stopped”.
The combination of Romania’s poverty with the forced increase in birthrate resulted in disastrous consequences. Mortality rates among pregnant women and infants set European records.
Malnutrition which resulted in stunted growth and mental disabilities was the norm, with both physical and sexual assault against the children not uncommon. AIDS spread among the orphan population due to tainted (and often medically unnecessary) blood transfusions.
In 1984 Ceausescu personally laid the cornerstone for the People’s House, a gargantuan edifice meant to have approximately five times the square footage of Versailles. It was to become the heaviest building on earth, and though it was supposedly built for the Romanian people it would serve the Ceausescus as the largest palace that had ever been constructed. Both the military and ordinary citizens were drafted to assist in its construction while hundreds of citizens literally froze to death every year in the Romanian winter. Many others died from asphyxiation due to turning on their stoves to
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But now that the Soviet Union had a much better relationship with the West, there was virtually no reason for Western countries to court Ceausescu as an antagonistic force against the USSR. The situation for the Romanian people seemed to be completely hopeless.
Indeed, when the results came in the Communists announced that they had been returned to office with 98.6% of the vote. The poll watchers, however, announced that that number was a fraud, that the number of protest votes was somewhere between 9-10%. This still would have resulted in a 90% vote for the Communists. They were lying even when it was unnecessary, and the West Germans made big news about this information.
The final result in Poland was almost a perfect inversion of the East German vote. There were thirty-five seats up for election in the lower house of Parliament; Solidarity won thirty-three of them in the first round of voting. In the Senate all one hundred seats were up for election. Solidarity won ninety-nine of them.
As amazing as it sounds, the unprecedented election where a nation democratically voted out their Communist Party wasn’t even the biggest worldwide news that day. That was because June 4, 1989 is remembered for a far more ominous event: the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Despite their earlier assurances when they had torn down the border between Austria and Hungary, now the Hungarian authorities explicitly refused to repatriate those East Germans within their borders. Rather than looking at them as predominantly citizens of the German Democratic Republic, Hungary now regarded them as refugees—and by this point there were a lot of them, around 85,000.[dlviii] Honecker was apoplectic, and even more so when the Russians refused to get involved.
