On the
20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Meye provides
a riveting eyewitness account of the collapse of Communism in Eastern
Europe that brilliantly rewrites our convenmtional understanding of how
the Cold War came to an end and holds important lessons for America's
geopolitical challenges.
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"Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down
this wall!" President Ronald Reagan's famous exhortation when visiting
Berlin in 1987 has long been widely cited as the clarion call that
brought the Cold War to an end.
The United States won, so this version of history goes, because Ronald
Reagan stood firm against the USSR; American resoluteness brought the
evil empire to its knees.
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Michael Meyer, who was there at the time as a Newsweek
bureau chief, begs to differ.
In this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that
roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, he shows that American intransigence was
only one of many factors that provoked world-shaking change. Meyer
draws together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise
of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the stealth opening of the
Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the collapse of
the infamous wall in Berlin. But the most important events, Meyer
contends, occurred secretly, in the heroic stands taken by individuals
in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright
Vaclav Havel in Prague; the Baltic shipwright Lech Walesa; the quietly
determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the
man who privately realized that his empire was already lost, and
decided -- with courage and intelligence -- to let it go in
peace,Soviet general secretary of the communist party, Mikhail
Gorbachev.
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The Year that Changed the World
The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Michael Meyer
Scribner,
2009
Order
a copy
Reviewed in
Out of the Past
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