Drake Bennett: Did we learn the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall?
[Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.]
With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this week, the news was filled with images of that epoch-ending night, and of the equally historic events that led up to and followed it. Those images, for the most part, are of crowds: strikers in Poland, the multitudes at the reburial of Hungary’s former prime minister Imre Nagy (executed in 1958 on orders from Moscow), the throngs in Prague chanting “Havel to the Castle,” the massed hecklers in Bucharest who forced Nicolae Ceausescu to try unsuccessfully to flee - and, of course, the thousands of East and West Germans who gathered restively at the Berlin Wall’s checkpoints on the night of Nov. 9 and flooded through when they opened.
Scenes like these vividly symbolize the popular conception of the upheavals of 1989: a mass uprising, rippling across Eastern Europe, that swept away the Berlin Wall and with it the brittle, corroded regimes that made up the Soviet empire.
It’s hardly surprising that this is the narrative that has taken hold. It’s a stirring idea, and a powerful one, comforting in the role it accords oppressed people to rise up and make their own fate. And the crowds in the streets are what the world saw at the time. But in the intervening two decades, as the participants themselves have written their
memoirs, as transcripts and memos have been declassified, and as documents have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain, many historians have begun to emphasize a different account. In this telling, it’s not the marching of the crowds on the street that made the difference, but something less visible: the unprecedented inaction and acquiescence of those at the top. In country after country, leaders responded to open challenges to their power by essentially giving in.
“People power,” in other words, didn’t end the Cold War, not alone. And the extent to which the popular understanding of those revolutionary months centers on the masses in the streets suggests that we may have learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Especially here in the United States, where rioting mobs helped spark the American Revolution and marchers spurred the Civil Rights movement, there is a particular faith in the power of taking it to the streets, and it was possible to see echoes of those American movements when mass protests erupted in Eastern Europe, or at various times in countries like Ukraine, Lebanon, Burma, the Philippines, or, most recently, Iran. But, historians say, what ultimately matters in authoritarian regimes is the resolve of those at the top, and that imposes stark limits on the power of the people.
It’s not just a question for Cold War scholars to debate. Misunderstanding the potential of popular protest can have tragic results, leading today’s dissidents, whether they’re in the Arab world or Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to risk life and limb in situations where there’s little prospect of success - where, unlike in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, the leadership is firmly committed to doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
“Regimes collapse when there’s a loss of will at the top to do whatever’s necessary to do to stay in power,” says Mark Kramer, a historian and head of the Harvard Project for Cold War Studies. “The Chinese communists showed that if you were willing to kill huge numbers of people and resort to ruthless violence, you could stay in power.” In Eastern Europe, he argues, “If that had been done early in the process, in August or September, had the Soviet Union given a green light for it, it certainly would have worked.”...
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With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this week, the news was filled with images of that epoch-ending night, and of the equally historic events that led up to and followed it. Those images, for the most part, are of crowds: strikers in Poland, the multitudes at the reburial of Hungary’s former prime minister Imre Nagy (executed in 1958 on orders from Moscow), the throngs in Prague chanting “Havel to the Castle,” the massed hecklers in Bucharest who forced Nicolae Ceausescu to try unsuccessfully to flee - and, of course, the thousands of East and West Germans who gathered restively at the Berlin Wall’s checkpoints on the night of Nov. 9 and flooded through when they opened.
Scenes like these vividly symbolize the popular conception of the upheavals of 1989: a mass uprising, rippling across Eastern Europe, that swept away the Berlin Wall and with it the brittle, corroded regimes that made up the Soviet empire.
It’s hardly surprising that this is the narrative that has taken hold. It’s a stirring idea, and a powerful one, comforting in the role it accords oppressed people to rise up and make their own fate. And the crowds in the streets are what the world saw at the time. But in the intervening two decades, as the participants themselves have written their
memoirs, as transcripts and memos have been declassified, and as documents have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain, many historians have begun to emphasize a different account. In this telling, it’s not the marching of the crowds on the street that made the difference, but something less visible: the unprecedented inaction and acquiescence of those at the top. In country after country, leaders responded to open challenges to their power by essentially giving in.
“People power,” in other words, didn’t end the Cold War, not alone. And the extent to which the popular understanding of those revolutionary months centers on the masses in the streets suggests that we may have learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Especially here in the United States, where rioting mobs helped spark the American Revolution and marchers spurred the Civil Rights movement, there is a particular faith in the power of taking it to the streets, and it was possible to see echoes of those American movements when mass protests erupted in Eastern Europe, or at various times in countries like Ukraine, Lebanon, Burma, the Philippines, or, most recently, Iran. But, historians say, what ultimately matters in authoritarian regimes is the resolve of those at the top, and that imposes stark limits on the power of the people.
It’s not just a question for Cold War scholars to debate. Misunderstanding the potential of popular protest can have tragic results, leading today’s dissidents, whether they’re in the Arab world or Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to risk life and limb in situations where there’s little prospect of success - where, unlike in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, the leadership is firmly committed to doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
“Regimes collapse when there’s a loss of will at the top to do whatever’s necessary to do to stay in power,” says Mark Kramer, a historian and head of the Harvard Project for Cold War Studies. “The Chinese communists showed that if you were willing to kill huge numbers of people and resort to ruthless violence, you could stay in power.” In Eastern Europe, he argues, “If that had been done early in the process, in August or September, had the Soviet Union given a green light for it, it certainly would have worked.”...