The Berlin Wall Fell Later

Addressing the first freely elected Polish Parliament in November 1991, former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa recalled his dissident origins. "In 1970, as I was leaving the Gdansk shipyard defeated, between two rows of tanks, I may have sighed, asking God how this system could be overthrown and this army defeated without bloodshed," he declared. "Here today, as Poland's president, I can say before a democratically elected Parliament: we have a free Poland now." (Article continued below...)

Implicit in Walesa's triumph is something many people in the West have now forgotten: as dramatic as it was, the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn't a singular event. The real story was the liberation of an entire region, which produced a series of spectacular historical moments in 1989 and culminated in the breech of the most visible symbol of the East-West divide. In effect, several metaphorical walls crumbled in 1989—in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania—triggering the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and, soon thereafter, the implosion of the Soviet Union itself.

Communism's collapse dates back to two key developments earlier that year. In Poland, the regime of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the strongman who had declared martial law in 1981 and outlawed the opposition known as Solidarity, had suddenly reversed itself in early 1989 and agreed to negotiate with the movement's leaders. By April, this produced accord that meant for the first time the country would hold partially free elections. Solidarity was allowed to contest a portion—though still a minority—of the parliamentary seats. In the June voting, the opposition won in a landslide—a stunning 260 of 261 contested seats. The victory triggered the defection of two small pro-government parties and tipped the political balance. Poland soon boasted the first noncommunist government in the Soviet bloc, sending shock waves across the region and straight to the Kremlin.

Hungary's communist rulers quickly understood which way the wind was blowing. To demonstrate their reform credentials, that summer they opened the border with Austria. The two countries' foreign ministers posed before an array of news cameras as they took wire cutters to the barbed fence there. Since Hungarians had been permitted to travel freely to Austria for a decade, the gesture was largely symbolic. But it had an immediate and devastating impact on East Germany. East Germans, who were only allowed to visit Hungary and other "fraternal socialist countries," quickly realized they could go to Hungary and then easily cross into Austria. It triggered a mass exodus, with groups of East Germans scurrying across the border, abandoning their previous lives and almost all their earthly belongings behind, not quite believing their good fortune. This exposed a gaping hole in the Iron Curtain, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was merely the logical postscript.

The ferment that led to those upheavals—as well as to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the violence in Romania later in 1989—was fueled by decades of resentment. There was the pent-up frustration of people who were living in a failed economic system, where everything from housing to basic foodstuffs were in chronic short supply, and the contrast with the prosperous West was glaringly evident. And there was the political discontent of people who had seen every freedom denied them in the name of "people's democracy."

Events that year fed on each other. Years of activism by dissenters from various groups—Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 human right's campaigners in Czechoslovakia, the "democratic opposition" in Hungary—had emboldened more people to challenge the communist system at every turn. As Czechoslovakia's dissident playwright and future president Václav Havel put it in his famous 1979 essay "The Power of the Powerless," the example of even a small brave minority could produce a giant ripple effect. A decade later, it did.

The powerful also played their part, in particular, the pope, the president, and the general secretary—John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Polish pope's election in 1978 looked like a miracle to his countrymen, and his calls for social justice and speaking the truth dovetailed perfectly with the dissident credo. Reagan dared to talk about the Evil Empire, challenge it with a major arms buildup and openly call for its demise. Gorbachev firmly believed he could save the communist system by reforming it. What he didn't realize was that, without the threat of Soviet tanks rolling in, popular discontent in Eastern Europe could no longer be contained.

By early 1989, as former Polish politburo member Stanislaw Ciosek explained, communist regimes knew they were in huge trouble. "It was obvious that our plane had lost its undercarriage, the engines were not working—but you had to make some sort of landing," he told me a couple of years later when he was serving as the new Poland's ambassador to Moscow. The Polish government gambled on elections; later, the East Germans would panic and, almost accidentally, open up the Berlin Wall. But by that time, walls were collapsing all around them, sweeping away communist reformers and hardliners alike. Along with them, an entire political system disappeared—to paraphrase its architects—into the dustbin of history.