11-05-2009, 12:03 AM
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Join Date: Oct 2007
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The Cause of the Fall
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No matter how clear we try to make it, looking back at 1989 is always a bit like peering into a kaleidoscope. Everything happened so quickly that the participants, from policymakers in Washington to Germans in the streets and Soviet apparatchiks, could barely keep up as the world they knew came crashing down. The end of communism in Europe, on some level at least, makes sense: the Soviets had bankrupted themselves, and their client states throughout Eastern Europe predicted a better future with the West. But if Moscow had wanted, it might have been able to thwart that path of history; instead, it simply allowed the march of freedom that everybody rushed to call inexorable. In fact, the West didn't win the Cold War so much as the East lost it.
Without the benefit of hindsight, though, events unfolded so rapidly that it was almost impossible to keep tabs on the blur. Take just one day, June 4. Solidarity, the political opposition movement in Poland that had been gathering steam for years, made a run at nationwide elections. (The communists had foolishly let them do so.) Though Solidarity toppled the old regime's three-legged throne, Washington was simultaneously blindsided with more earth-shattering news. On the very same day, another communist regime flexed its muscle, slaughtering pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. And as if China's crackdown weren't enough to crowd Washington's bandwidth, news also broke that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian revolution and archenemy of the U.S., had died. In the first half of 1989, Poland became a blip.
A raft of new books on the fall of the Berlin Wall venture back to the most tumultuous year in world politics since the end of the Second World War, trying to reconstruct exactly what happened and why. Reading them together is like twisting that kaleidoscope and doing everything to avoid vertigo. But important patterns emerge: for one thing, American statesmanship had little, if anything, to do with the actual fall of the wall. If any single person deserves the credit, it was Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, not President Reagan. For another, things happened so fast that the United States couldn't have pulled the strings even if it had wanted to. The fall of the Soviet Union was like other great revolutions in history—first a hairline fracture in the glass, and then a deafening break as it shattered. Three Authors on Why the Berlin Wall Fell | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com
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I would like to read them all.  It would make a good self study project. 
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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Pantheon Books), the British historian and newspaperman Victor Sebestyen sets the scene, reporting that the CIA, with the help of the Vatican, funneled more than $50 million to Solidarity over the years.
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The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Simon & Schuster), Michael Meyer recounts the insight of a national-security aide at the time: "We in Washington often found ourselves in the role of thrilled, if not to say astonished, onlookers.
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Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library), Kotkin concedes that the Solidarity movement galvanized something like "civil society" in turning back the communists, but he says that it did not liberate Poland on the basis of its strength or savvy: "Most analysts continue to focus disproportionately, even exclusively on the 'opposition,' " but a powerful, organized movement did not exist anywhere in Eastern Europe.
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I did not win the Powerball again! 
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
--Jonathan Swift
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