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The building and breaching of a historic barrier
KEEBLE McFARLANE
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Picture this: on a chilly November day 92 years ago, a fanatical follower of the German philosopher, Karl Marx, rouses him from his grave in London's Highgate cemetery where he has been buried for 34 years. "Wake up, Karl!
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| KEEBLE McFARLANE |
The revolution has happened!" "Where?" asks Marx. "Berlin? London? Who did the trick?" "No, No, not Berlin, not London. St Petersburg. Lenin and the Bolsheviks led the revolution!" replied the excited apostle. "That can't be!" replied Marx. "Russia is still a feudal society. The conditions for a people's revolution are just not there!"
Fanciful, yes, but Marx's supposed reaction is not surprising, since the societies he and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, studied were the most developed of the 19th century - England and Germany. Those two European powers were the industrial and economic giants of the age, conjuring up invention after invention and manufacturing them in ever increasingly intricate and sophisticated factories.
The old feudal system where wealthy landowners lived off the labour of the peasants who worked the land morphed into a new form in which the workers produced vastly more wealth than the peasants ever could, but still received very little of that wealth. The theories Marx and Engels developed out of their studies were supposed to break up that system and ultimately end misery and strife. As the quality of living conditions decreased, they postulated, workers would revolt, take over government and set up a classless society. Eventually there would be no need for such things as government or police, and people would live in peace and freedom.
Leaving aside the dream-like quality of the theory (and at the risk of committing an ethnic slur), the Russians put their heavy Slavic hands on this Utopian scheme and the world will never know whether the communist idea even had a chance of approaching success.
First of all, a chap who used the nom-de-guerre Lenin (why do revolutionaries love these code names?) eliminated other factions who had different ideas about how the new society should be organised and established a one-party system. He created a new "federation" - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - which was, in fact, a continuation of the old Tsarist Russian empire. After his death seven years later, a soulless character from the Caucasian republic of Georgia who called himself Stalin (Man of Steel) took over and, in effect, said, "No more Mister Nice Guy!"
The Soviet Union suffered grievously in the Second World War, as Hitler felt the Slavs were sub-humans and he craved the vast tracts of land they occupied as the Lebensraum (living space) he desired for the Aryan supermen he clamed his compatriots were. The Soviet Union did much of the heavy lifting in getting rid of his Third Reich, and as the dust settled claimed the territories it had liberated from the Germans.
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| WEST BERLIN... Keeble McFarlane walking past a church 40 years ago which was bombed by the allies and re-built, leaving the steeple as it was as a reminder of the war. |
The world settled into almost a half-century of what very quickly became known as the Cold War. The Russians imposed governments like their own on the eastern part of Germany, on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. People in the subjugated states rose up in revolt from time to time, only to be swatted down brutally by Moscow's forces. They sullenly went about their business behind the elaborate barbed-wire fences and concrete walls which separated them from the west. This forbidding barrier, patrolled by armed guards and sniffer dogs, was very early on dubbed by Winston Churchill as the "Iron Curtain".
Forty years ago I visited Berlin, a bizarre place bisected by a concrete wall three or four metres high, with two separate sets of infrastructure. You still saw signs in German, English, French and Russian proclaiming, "You are entering the French sector" or "You are leaving the American sector". East Berlin (the Soviet sector) was considered part of the German Democratic Republic, the fanciful name the East German regime gave itself.
Crossing through the wall was limited to a handful of sites, the most notorious being Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse (Frederick Street) between the American and Soviet sectors. When I went through it the car was searched and the underside checked with small mirrors mounted on wheels!
As the 21st century approached, the thinking among the upper levels of the Kremlin began to change and a fellow called Mikhail Gorbachov took over in 1985. He had travelled abroad and saw very clearly the contrasts between those societies and his own. He also understood that the Soviet Union could no longer continue the arms race with the United States and its allies without reducing its already stagnant economic performance and standard of living.
Gorbachov did not set out to destroy the system but rather to make it work better. His main tools were glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), but the bureaucrats who ran things were resistant. He discussed disarmament with the Americans and eventually enjoyed some success. He regarded the satellite countries as a drain on the battered Soviet economy, and encouraged them to think of economic reforms to reduce their dependence on Moscow. But things spun out of control and after only five years he was out of a job.
The rulers of the satellite nations now saw that Moscow would no longer stomp its boots over them, and began, ever so gingerly, to relax their grip. As the 1980s trickled away, hard-won reforms began to take place. Shipyard workers in Poland formed a union they called Solidarity which eventually forced a democratic election early in 1989 and brought in a new, non-communist government. By that time Hungary had all but ceased to be communist, with Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth bringing in reforms, holding roundtable discussions and so forth. By June, he had made agreements with Austria to ease border controls and allow Hungarians to cross with minimum formalities.
Next Monday, there will be huge celebrations in Berlin to mark the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the infamous Wall, an occasion generally regarded as the moment when the Iron Curtain was breached. A dramatic event to be sure, but it came three months after the actual break.
August 19 was when the first crack appeared in the great bastion which divided Europe. Hungarian and Austrian officials had planned a ceremony at a border crossing near the community of Sopron. They were to open a gate and shake hands across the boundary line. A Hungarian activist, Laszlo Magas, whose mother had been imprisoned years earlier when she tried to cross, organised a protest picnic to coincide with the ceremony. Word had gone out about the event and some East Germans had driven all the way in their puny Wartburg and Trabant cars.
No one had told the Hungarian soldiers about what was to happen, and that morning, hours before the ceremony, a guard called Bella Arpad was surprised to see about 150 East Germans approaching the gate. Standing orders were to shoot anyone trying to cross, but in a split second he made a decision that changed history. He knew he would be in trouble if he disobeyed, but shooting would create panic and result in many people being killed. As it turned out, his commanding officer gave him a severe bawling-out but nothing more came of it.
By the end of that summer day, more than 600 East Germans had crossed into Austria in the hitherto unreachable West. During the next three weeks, the crossing remained open and thousands of East Germans poured through. The regime in East Berlin was furious, and pressed the Hungarians to close the border post once more.
But the episode had highlighted the stupidity of the whole setup and people began street demonstrations all across East Germany until November, when a local communist official told a news conference East Germans were free to travel to the west. The rest, as we have witnessed, is history.
We'll discuss that next week.
keeble.mack@sympatico.ca
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