The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The overhaul of the Berlin WallThe Fall of the Berlin WallThe record books, the political polemics, and stinting and the geopolitical analyses of the fall of collectivism and the break-up of the Soviet colligation fill shelves with cruel crimes committed for the party and proletariat under the fear regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. The land up of the empire, however, was humiliatingly public, glowing on millions of television screens as sledgehammers rupture chunks out of the Berlin Wall.The end of the end began in 1985 with the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev and a natural generation of Soviet leaders born by and by Stalin and his paranoid terrors had died. Ironically, the penultimate cause of the collapse was the Soviet amount of moneys invasion of Afghanistan, where it fought a hopeless fight for nearly a decade, which that almost crushed its economy to a duty tour and, like the Vietnam war, called into question field leaders and purpose. The presidency pas sed from a earlier incompetent Jimmy Carter to Ronald Regan, who had no appetite for further appeasement with the Kremlin. historiographer Paul Johnson argues that the tremendous losses in Afghanistan left the Soviet trade union incap equal of facing President Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative, and the new leadership in Moscow realized that their violet ventures had caused the Soviet economy to eat on (History of the American People 928-29).For our internal progress, Gorbachev said in 1987, we need recipe international relations. The Soviets had to catch up to the rising prosperity and technological advances of atomic number 63 and North America. The Soviet sexual union had to concentrate on domestic ontogeny and promote international peace whenever possible. However, it could all accomplish such a goal by giving up all global ambitions. Therefore, as Paul Johnson and other historians point out, Gorbachev abandoned the conventional Soviet anti-western orientation. He w anted to integrate the Soviet sexual union into the main currents of modern lifespan and that meant democracy, free enterprise and a market economy.He gave the Soviet Union and the World two slogansperestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Perestroika held out the promise of reorganizing the state and nine. For example, various(prenominal) go-ahead would be revived and there would be emphasis on engineering science and a higher standard of living. Glasnost was the corrective held up to Stalinist excesses. nudeness would permit the open discussion of the nations problems and it would rid public thinking of propaganda and lies.Soviet pseudo-history, pilloried in George Orwells dystopian novel, 1984, tapered off. New histories published archival poppycock on the Stalinist purges and the Great Terror.In Gorbachevs way of thinking, the Russian communist Party was to serve as the vanguard of perestroika and stimulate civic exertion and responsibility. In 1990, the Sup reme Soviet elected Gorbachev as the countrys president for a term of five years. At the time, Gorbachev was still the leader of the increasingly unpopular commie Party. Economic changes accompanied these political reforms. Industrial enterprise was further which in turn would foster private initiative and loosed the stranglehold of decades of commutation planning. By 1990, Gorbachev was cautiously promoting a market economy including the individuals right to accept private property. Religious independences were restored and in 1988, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrate its 1000th anniversary. Meanwhile, contacts with the outside human beings, especially the west, began to intensify. However, all this seemingly good wring especially from the western perspective had its downside as well. For instance, glasnost released decades of bitterness which had accumulated e verywhere the fifty years of Stalinist repression and terror. Perestroika and glasnost also revealed the widesp read ecological molest the Soviets had caused on the environment. Gorbachevs reforms also polarized opinion in ways that even Gorbachev and his unfearing supporters could never have foreseen.In an effort to preserve unity by compromise, Gorbachev entered a bitter quarrel with his more radical rival, Boris Yeltsin. The weakening of traditional Soviet authority and the release of history brought about by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, in the end, brought disunity. Meanwhile, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians all demanded independence which in turn set off same demands among Ukrainians, Georgians, Byelorussians, Armenians and the various mickles of central Asia. By the late 1980s, inter-ethnic violence had escalated. And in 1990, the Russian Republic, the largest republic of the Soviet Union, declared its limited independence under Yeltsin, and an Anti-Reform Russian communist Party broke off from the reformist party conspiracy led by Gorbachev.Meanwhile, the transition to a market economy was likewise complex for ready and easy solutions. The production and distri scarceion of consumer goods collapsed. Local governments hoarded necessity commodities and the black market flourished as did the Russian Mafia. As journalist David Remnick has composethe communistic Party apparatus was the most gigantic Mafia the solid ground has ever known. It guarded its monopoly on power with a sham consensus and report and backed it up with the force of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police. (Kreis, History Guide)In October 1990, Gorbachev remarked, unfortunately, our society is not ready for the procedures of a law-based state. Oppressed generations lose high expectations and the Communist elite, hypothetically similar to the Guardians in Platos utopia had lost perspective. Grenville twists an old maxim that explains the nearsightedness Absolute power not only corrupts, it blinds (894).Gorbachevs own hammer wet-nurse for Eastern Europe, Harold Evans observes , was to renounce Brezhnevs imperial doctrine by which the Soviet Union had claimed the right to intervene in defense of its ideology in any Communist country (American Century 655).Outside the Soviet Union, perestroika and glasnost spread among people who were resentful of Soviet domination and worried about economic collapse. In 1989 and 1990, these people showed their dislike of communist leadership and demanded democratic reforms.Poland took the lead. Here the universe was traditionally anti-Russian. The Poles had long protested their countrys economic decline. Soviet assurance to assist and massive loans from western Europe brought no relief. The slightest relaxation of Soviet control only advance toss off nationalism, which had always been expressed with the support of the papistic Catholic Church. With the selection of pontiff John Paul II in 1978, ending nationalism surged ahead. In 1980, workers under the leadership of a electrician, Lech Walesa, succeeded in forming an independent labor union called Solidarity. Pressured by a series of strikes, the Polish government recognized Solidarity, despite threats of Soviet intervention. J.A.S. Grenville hits the truth squarely citizenry lost their fear of the state (894)Significantly, the Christian Cross opposed the Soviet hammer and sickle. As nearly all observers assumed, Walesa enjoyed the hefty support of the Roman Catholic Church and from Polish Catholics in the United States that warrants amplification. Scholars and historians ordain flip for years to come the precise causes and historical forces that produced the sudden collapse of fabianism at the end of the 1980s. One matter not in dispute, however, will be the earth-shattering role played in the process by Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope.Jack Kemp stresses the spiritual strength and private prestige the Pope put behind the Solidarity, or freedom movement. From the daylight of Cardinal Karol Wojtylas election to the papacy in October 1 978, Kemp observes, the Pope began to shake the very foundations of communism (Human Events). With a Polish Pope in Rome, the Polish church increased its resistance against communism. Pope John Paul II encouraged his fellow countryman, Lech Walesa, as Kemp reports, and Walesa eventually became president of Poland post-communism (Human Events).After the crumbing of totalitarian communism, Pope John Paul II released a papal encyclical letter titled Centesimus Annus (1991), which explained within a Christian framework why communism had failed and from that failure drew lessons about social, political and economic organization. The papal encyclical urged people not to establish an ideological heaven on land except to maintain human dignity and social conditions conducive to all(prenominal) individuals opportunity to achieve salvation of his soul. In short, the Pontiff placed individual freedom deeply within the core of Christian theology. In January 1989, Solidarity was legalized and the Communist Party retired.In May 1989, Hungary abolished the communist bureaucracy. By years end there were more than fifty political parties. In East Germany, the upheaval in 1989 was even more momentous. East Germany had always been indispensable to Soviet Russia. Its industry was nationalized, its agriculture collectivized and its people regimented by the Communist Party. In June 1953, the workers of East Berlin staged an uprising. What followed as a steady exodus of skilled workers into West Germany. Three million people escaped earlier the East German government erected the infamous Berlin Wall in dire 1961. The East Germans braved their lives to escape they voted with their feet.Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary soon followed suit and East and West Germany unite in 1990. In the long and bitter Cold War, capitalism and freedom triumphed over communism and tyranny. Gorbachev and Yeltsin came along at the right time and face the hidden facts of a long rui ned system. American military and economic power made the Cold War too costly for the Soviet Union to press without smashing up.Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Walesa, and the Pope helped cause the fall of communism, but none compared with the late President Ronald Regan and his innocent audacity (Evans 656) who called the Soviet Union an empire of Evil and threatened to bankrupt it with a star wars defense. The national and international causes of the fall of communism were rooted in economic, military, political, trade balances, and imperial illusions, but few can deny that the United States, for decade after decade, carried the brunt of containing a predatory system. Future historians may revive tentative conclusions, but one that seems to do justice to the fall comes from Harold Evans at the end of his The American CenturyHistory will go on unraveling the knot of circumstance, stratagem, chance, and personality. In the end, it is unlikely that no single brow will be able to claim the wreath of victory over a dangerous and discourage totalitarianism. But there can be no doubt that it was the American example, in its spiritual as well as its material beneficence, that in the long dark years was the torch of freedom all the world could see. (656)Works CitedBoyer, Paul S., ed. The Oxford Companion to United StatesHistory. Oxford Oxford UP, 2001.Evans, Harold. The American Century. New York Knopf, 1998.Fall of Communism. U.S Department of State. December 8, 2005.http//www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/dr/17672.htmGrenville, J.A. S. A History of the World in the TwentiethCentury. Cambridge Harvard UP, 1994.Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New YorkHarper, 1997.Kemp, Jack. How the Pope Helped Bring about the Fall ofCommunism. Human Events. stick on Apr 5, 2005.http//www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7064Kreis, Steven. The History Guide. 1989 The Walls Came TumblingDown. http//www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture16.htmlAccessed Dec. 8, 2005.