"I watched old videos of fall 1989, said Barclay "where the East German leadership praised the Chinese solution to uprisings and threatened their people with a bloody massacre if they tried rebellion. However, when the time came, it didn't happen.
The opening of the Berlin Wall is also an opportunity to see the confluence of local and global events, said Barclay.
"It was a product of local circumstances where people discovered they no longer had to be afraid of their government given the political situation and state of the Communist Party in the Eastern Bloc.
Also, the number of serendipitous events that culminated in the fall of communism was by far the most peaceful of revolutions after the most horrifically violent century in history, said Barclay. This gave people some cause for optimism. (The exceptions to peaceful change, of course, were the 1991 overthrow of the Nicolae Ceau...Ÿescu government Romania and the Moscow coup in August 19-21, 1991 when Communist Party hardliners tried to arrest Mikhail Gorbachev.)
Barclay was also in Berlin in December 1991 when the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. He noted that the huge Soviet embassy flew the red flag with the hammer and sickle one day and that it was replaced the next day with the red, white and blue-striped flag of Russia.
"I had literally seen the pages of history turn, he said, alluding to Goethe's comment on change.
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