1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe by Mary Elise Sarotte

As the huge and growing crowd of protesters paraded around Leipzig’s main boulevard on the evening of 9 October 1989, they viewed with trepidation the forbidding headquarters of the Stasi — East Germany’s secret police — looming ahead. “Here is where it ends,” some of the leaders of the march said to one another.

Instead, it was the beginning. Neither the white-helmeted riot police guarding the building nor the troops deployed behind the cavernous main train station impeded the crowd, unlike the Chinese troops who had gunned down protesters in Tiananmen Square in defense of a communist regime the previous June. Instead, the marchers proceeded triumphantly, shouting, “Wir sind das Volk (We are the people).”

“It was clear after Leipzig in October 1989 that nonviolence became the order of the day in Europe,” writes Mary Elise Sarotte in 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, a superb new account of the stunning events of 20 years ago. “This leads to another surprise in the second half of 1989: like China, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union served as leaders for the events that unfolded. For that brief but important time, events on the ground mattered more than superpower actions. Western countries and institutions… were basically spectators to the dramatic upheaval at the end of the year.”

In a cosmic joke on Marx and Lenin, the East German government all but withered away with shocking speed. The Berlin Wall, symbol of Cold War division, fell exactly a month later, on 9 November. By 19 December, when West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited Dresden and was ecstatically greeted by an East German crowd shouting for reunification, it became obvious to him that the once unimaginable prospect was already “a done deal.” Less than a year later, on 3 October 1990, the formal papers were signed.

While the essence of Sarotte’s argument was detectable even as events unfolded, it may come as a surprise to American readers who have long been fed a counter-narrative by acolytes of Ronald Reagan — that the fall of the Wall (and, by extension, the Soviet Union and its empire) stemmed from Reagan’s 1987 challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, delivered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Reagan was no necromancer, as Sarotte’s prodigious and original research makes clear. While street demonstrations brought down the Wall, more conventional politicking and diplomacy dotted the i’s in 1990.

Drawing on previously unavailable documents and access to some major players, Sarotte shows how Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, and his shrewd secretary of state, James A. Baker, played essential roles in encouraging German reunification after some early stumbles. Their shrewdest move was trusting Kohl to work out vital details with the conflicted, embattled Gorbachev — and to provide the financial underpinning — for reunification and the withdrawal of the 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany. The Soviet leader’s own advisers despaired that he was selling his nation’s patrimony, won in World War II at the cost of millions of lives, for a mess of pottage; some would become plotters in the failed 1991 coup against his successor, Boris N. Yeltsin.

Kohl, who takes on the stature of a modern-day Bismarck in this book, may have had an oafish public image (he is the size of an NFL tackle), but proved surprisingly nimble and subtle in his diplomacy, if ruthless in seizing advantage. So skillful was he that Gorbachev would later lament, repeatedly, that he had fallen into a trap.

Throughout the negotiations over Germany’s fate, Gorbachev and his aides were guilty of “failing to grasp what was at stake,” Sarotte writes. “They thought they had more time to sort out big issues for post-Cold War Europe.” But Kohl realized that “the German train was now arriving at the station. Either the Germans got on or they let it go, in which case there would not be another opportunity during his lifetime,” Kohl is quoted as saying in a British diplomatic document obtained by Sarotte.

It helped Kohl that the West German economy was at its apogee, and that he could guarantee billions of deutsche marks in aid to the Soviets. “Kohl was right to think that he could buy Soviet approval (even though he would not publicly use that phrase), but the price was going to be high,” Sarotte writes.

The squalor that Gorbachev experienced as a youth and even as he rose through the Soviet ranks led him to want better for his people, Sarotte writes, citing her 2008 conversation with Kohl’s closest adviser, Horst Teltschik: “It was not entirely unreasonable to hope that extensive cooperation with wealthy West Germany, traded for unity, could provide help in reaching that goal.”

One might argue that Sarotte should have spent more time assessing the impact on East German dissidents of Solidarity’s electoral triumph in Poland, which occurred at the same time as Tiananmen and, like Leipzig, provided a model for peaceful change. Or that in examining the legacy of reunification, she focuses excessively on the NATO expansion that it triggered and how this angered and flummoxed the Russians. Or that she noodles about whether either side could have negotiated a better outcome — a dubious speculation.

She also could have examined in more detail how Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, in 1989 a KGB operative in Dresden, learned counter-lessons, including how to quell popular uprisings such as Chechnya and how to outmaneuver the West by threatening to cut off natural gas supplies.

I have a personal quibble, too. Foreign journalists, Sarotte writes, “were banned from Leipzig altogether” on 9 October. In fact, I was there, along with a reporter for London’s Independent and a photographer from Time‘s Vienna bureau.

But it is the rare diamond that is flawless. This is a work of coruscating intelligence and inspired scholarship that brims with provocative conclusions, well-argued and documented. It will appeal to casual readers and scholars alike who want to revisit how history turned on its hinges 20 years ago.