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twenty years ago today
Nov. 9th, 2009 12:47 pmI was around - though nowhere in the immediate vicinity - when the Berlin Wall fell, and the Iron Curtain along with it, and great were the falls thereof. And I read the news at the time, of course, though it was so eventful and unexpected that it was hard to make coherent sense of it. Even back in the summer, the reports of East Germans flocking to Hungary on "vacation" to slip across the Austrian border had indicated that something particularly unusual was going on, but it hadn't predicted what came next.
I've been waiting twenty years for a good, clear, detailed, readable book account of exactly what happened that amazing year. I'm less interested in an analysis of why it happened, which in outline we've already got, than in a rich telling of the juicy details.
I'm still waiting, but it appears I may not have to wait much longer.
I went to the public library to seek out one book on the topic that had gotten good reviews. I came away with four.
The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin) actually came out four years ago, and I first tried to find it then, but the library copies were all out. Instead, I found, and eventually bought, a copy of Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (OUP) of 1997, which does exactly what I want, only it just covers the first 25 years or so of the Cold War: rich, thoroughly explanatory, and entertainingly written accounts of exactly what the leaders of all sides thought they were doing during such events as the setting up of the two Germanies, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before the Fall, Communist behavior was a mysterious black box to us out here. But as Gaddis says, we now know, and it's an eye-opener. In his picture, the Communist leaders are almost lovable bunglers.
Anyway, his later book is also well-written, accurate, and informative, but trying to cover a longer period of time in considerably less space, it's less detailed, less juicy. Excellent book on its own terms, but not quite what I'm looking for. Onward.
The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown (HarperCollins). Blimey, this covers an even longer period, but it's also a bigger book. Yes, the section on the Fall is detailed, and long enough to have stood as a short book by itself. Brown is not a bad writer by any means, but not a particularly good one, either. He's less interesting on events, though he's careful to delve into each of the Warsaw Pact countries, than on analysis. In his view, the key event that set all else in motion occurred back in 1983-4, when Andropov - not a reformer, but a man who realized that the gerontocracy desperately needed new blood, and recognized intelligence and energy when he saw it - tried to set Gorbachev up as his immediate successor. He didn't succeed (remember Chernenko?), but Gorbachev did accumulate enough power then that, when a chance came a year later, he was able to steamroller over otherwise implacable opposition and take office. What happened after that was inevitable, Brown says, even if Gorby didn't realize it himself, but it would never have happened had another commissar taken over instead.
The Year That Changed the World by Michael Meyer (Scribner). This is the one I saw good reviews of, but I'm finding it almost unreadable. Gaddis and Brown are scholars, but Meyer is a journalist. His intensely breezy style might be OK in a series of short newsmagazine articles read one at a time, but at book length it's intolerable. I doubt I'll finish this, because despite the good level of detail, Meyer treats events as overdetermined, and his breathless "I was there! I was there!" descriptions just bite. His idea of the key event is the determination of the new Hungarian government in 1988-89 to liberalize. He probably thinks that because he interviewed the Hungarian leaders at the time. Of course Meyer realizes this would have meant nothing had the Soviets cracked down with the iron fist they'd used in various countries in 1953, 1956, 1968, etc etc., and he isn't arguing with Brown's contention that Gorbachev's hands-off policy made it all possible, but he thinks that where he was, that's where the action was.
Hammer and Tickle by Ben Lewis (Pegasus). Here's something different: a history of Communist jokes; that is, the anti-establishment jokes that people told under Communism. Lewis thinks he has a complete collection, to the point where he does statistical analyses of them, and he actually boasts of how when he meets scholarly experts on the subject, he stamps on their jokes by telling the punchlines first because he already knows them all, you see. What an obnoxious berk. He's also annoyed at the scholars because they refuse to tell him what he wants to hear, that the jokes brought the Evil Empire down. And Lech Walesa sighs at him because he (Walesa) thinks that the jokes merely inured people to their lot, and Gorbachev won't grant an interview unless you give him $10,000.
But Lewis does have a lot of good jokes. Here's a couple touching on subjects of special interest to me:
I've been waiting twenty years for a good, clear, detailed, readable book account of exactly what happened that amazing year. I'm less interested in an analysis of why it happened, which in outline we've already got, than in a rich telling of the juicy details.
I'm still waiting, but it appears I may not have to wait much longer.
I went to the public library to seek out one book on the topic that had gotten good reviews. I came away with four.
The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin) actually came out four years ago, and I first tried to find it then, but the library copies were all out. Instead, I found, and eventually bought, a copy of Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (OUP) of 1997, which does exactly what I want, only it just covers the first 25 years or so of the Cold War: rich, thoroughly explanatory, and entertainingly written accounts of exactly what the leaders of all sides thought they were doing during such events as the setting up of the two Germanies, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before the Fall, Communist behavior was a mysterious black box to us out here. But as Gaddis says, we now know, and it's an eye-opener. In his picture, the Communist leaders are almost lovable bunglers.
Anyway, his later book is also well-written, accurate, and informative, but trying to cover a longer period of time in considerably less space, it's less detailed, less juicy. Excellent book on its own terms, but not quite what I'm looking for. Onward.
The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown (HarperCollins). Blimey, this covers an even longer period, but it's also a bigger book. Yes, the section on the Fall is detailed, and long enough to have stood as a short book by itself. Brown is not a bad writer by any means, but not a particularly good one, either. He's less interesting on events, though he's careful to delve into each of the Warsaw Pact countries, than on analysis. In his view, the key event that set all else in motion occurred back in 1983-4, when Andropov - not a reformer, but a man who realized that the gerontocracy desperately needed new blood, and recognized intelligence and energy when he saw it - tried to set Gorbachev up as his immediate successor. He didn't succeed (remember Chernenko?), but Gorbachev did accumulate enough power then that, when a chance came a year later, he was able to steamroller over otherwise implacable opposition and take office. What happened after that was inevitable, Brown says, even if Gorby didn't realize it himself, but it would never have happened had another commissar taken over instead.
The Year That Changed the World by Michael Meyer (Scribner). This is the one I saw good reviews of, but I'm finding it almost unreadable. Gaddis and Brown are scholars, but Meyer is a journalist. His intensely breezy style might be OK in a series of short newsmagazine articles read one at a time, but at book length it's intolerable. I doubt I'll finish this, because despite the good level of detail, Meyer treats events as overdetermined, and his breathless "I was there! I was there!" descriptions just bite. His idea of the key event is the determination of the new Hungarian government in 1988-89 to liberalize. He probably thinks that because he interviewed the Hungarian leaders at the time. Of course Meyer realizes this would have meant nothing had the Soviets cracked down with the iron fist they'd used in various countries in 1953, 1956, 1968, etc etc., and he isn't arguing with Brown's contention that Gorbachev's hands-off policy made it all possible, but he thinks that where he was, that's where the action was.
Hammer and Tickle by Ben Lewis (Pegasus). Here's something different: a history of Communist jokes; that is, the anti-establishment jokes that people told under Communism. Lewis thinks he has a complete collection, to the point where he does statistical analyses of them, and he actually boasts of how when he meets scholarly experts on the subject, he stamps on their jokes by telling the punchlines first because he already knows them all, you see. What an obnoxious berk. He's also annoyed at the scholars because they refuse to tell him what he wants to hear, that the jokes brought the Evil Empire down. And Lech Walesa sighs at him because he (Walesa) thinks that the jokes merely inured people to their lot, and Gorbachev won't grant an interview unless you give him $10,000.
But Lewis does have a lot of good jokes. Here's a couple touching on subjects of special interest to me:
Q. How do you form a Russian string quartet?And this bitter one told in Czechoslovakia after 1968:
A. Send a Russian orchestra on an overseas tour.
Q. What's the most secure country in the world?So now I'm waiting for 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe by Mary Elise Sarotte (Princeton) and Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen (Pantheon), which the libraries don't have yet but might be the books I'm looking for.
A. Israel, because it doesn't have any friendly neighbors.
