The opening of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism is a lesson in "historical humility, said Barclay, where people thought history was on their side. It also illustrates the dangers of false utopias, the arrogance of power and the law of unintended consequences.
"Marxism and Leninism were driven by a utopian vision where its leaders were convinced of its rectitude and absolute, scientifically-determined necessity, he said. "They believed communism was on the right side of history.
In the mid-1960s the communist leaders pretty much stopped believing in historical inevitability, all except for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1958-64), said Barclay, but the oafish regimes of the Eastern Bloc were still products of this belief system. In 1989, they held a monopoly of power and lived under the ultimate protective cover of the Soviet Army. They also relied on two tenets. The first was the belief in the absolute political monopoly of the Communist Party where the party was always right, even if it shifted its position.
The second tenet is the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was first articulated in 1968 after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia: any country in the Eastern Bloc that attempted to break with communist principles would confront the Soviet army. Slovak leader Alexander DubÄ ek (1968-69) had gone a step too far in the region's de-Stalinization effort when he tried to decentralize the Czechoslovakian economy and democratize its political system by granting certain freedoms, which included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel . However, things had drastically changed in 1980-81 when the Solidarity movement in Poland challenged its Communist leadership. The Soviet military did not intervene. By 1988-89, Soviet Premier Gorbachev finally declared he would no longer enforce these two tenets.
Gorbachev's move was really one that came out of necessity, said Barclay. The Soviet Union had exhausted its resources, the Army had been bled dry by its nine-year war with Afghanistan (1979-89), and the economy was in shambles and unable to support any further military adventures.
Today, the developing consensus among historians is that President Ronald Reagan's (1981-89) strategy of forcing the Soviets to spend beyond their means not only worked but it accelerated their demise. And although a lot of Americans were upset at the time by Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. Star Wars), the plan for the extravagant space-based anti-missile system scared the Russians enough that it led them to increase their military spending.
Finally, the influence of the Tiananmen Square massacre (June 4, 1989) on the opening of the Berlin Wall cannot be underestimated, said Barclay. The bloodshed inflicted by the Chinese government was a no-holds-barred reaction to popular dissent against communism.
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