Nina Khrushcheva: The Walls of August

Nina Khrushcheva, author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, teaches international affairs at The New School and is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York.

History’s milestones are rarely so neatly arrayed as they are this summer. Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born. After some hesitation, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev allowed his East German counterpart, Walter Ulbricht, to erect a barrier between East and West Berlin in order to ensure the survival of communism in the entire Soviet bloc. By that point, East Germany had hemorrhaged 3 million people, including many of its most talented, as hundreds each day peacefully walked into the zones of Berlin that were controlled by the United States, Britain and France.

And 20 years ago this week, hard-liners in the Soviet government attempted to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who, two years after U.S. President Ronald Reagan memorably called on him to “tear down this wall,” did just that. Somewhat miraculously, a reformer who wanted Russians to be part of the democratic West had come to power in the Kremlin.

Gorbachev’s hard-line Politburo adversaries, like those who had hemmed in Khrushchev at the time of the Berlin Wall’s construction, were determined to preserve the decrepit system that the wall symbolized. But in August 1991, ordinary Muscovites stood their ground. They defied the coup makers, and in the end carried with them much of the Russian Army. With their defiance, the coup was doomed…