The Year that Changed the World (5 page)

It is almost impossible to comprehend the full dimension and consequence of the Cold War. For future generations, it will define the twentieth century. It dwarfs any other event, from the First and Second World Wars to the invention of the computer, modern telecommunications and the democratization of Wall Street. Since 1945, writes the author Martin Walker, “the history of the Cold War has been the history of the world.”

It was the first truly global conflict, sucking in geographies and drawing battle lines between allies and adversaries that even World War II did not. It pitted two utterly alien political and economic systems, do or die, one against the other. There were few genuinely neutral parties, save Swiss bankers and some neolithic tribes in the remnants of the Amazon forest. Almost every nation and people were drawn in or touched by it. Americans fought in Vietnam and Korea, Laos and Cambodia. So did Turks, Algerians and Chinese. Cubans fought in Angola; Saudis battled Russians in Afghanistan. Proxy wars raged in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. We raced to close imagined “missile gaps,” beat the Russians to the moon. Weapons manufactured for World War III in Europe were sold across the world, spawning regional arms races, wars and political upheavals. Ethnic and nationalist conflicts assumed geostrategic significance: India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Ethiopia and Somalia. Geographies became blocs, tinted blue or red, free and unfree. A bizarre constellation of places resonated fearsomely with even the youngest schoolchildren, Russian and American, Asian as well as European: Saigon. Hanoi. Seoul. Pyongyang. Kabul. Katanga. Tehran. Phnom Penh. Budapest. Prague. Warsaw. Salvador. Santiago. Honduras. Guatemala. Berlin.

The Cold War was a uniquely total war, not in movements of armies but in its social and economic effects. Dwight Eisenhower warned against a “military-industrial complex,” with its vast army, intelligence apparatus and defense industries mobilized for a war that would wipe out human civilization. For the better part of five decades it absorbed anywhere from a quarter to a half of all U.S. government spending and 10 percent of the nation's GNP. The Cold War shaped America, in ways not always obvious. The interstate highway system was originally built to speed military logistics from one part of the country to the other. Today's Internet, with all its transformative effect on commerce and daily life, began as a military communications network designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear strike. The federal loans that generations of young Americans have relied upon for college began with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, a crash program launched after Sputnik to win the “brain race” against the Soviets. The California dream rode the tides of defense spending pouring into the state, swelling its population from 5 million before the Cold War began to more than 30 million by the time it ended. A whole new economic order evolved within the Cold War's shadow: Bretton Woods. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The United Nations. The U.S. Agency for International Development. The Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild postwar Europe. Postwar investment in Japan and the network of international trade and security organizations that spanned the globe, from SEATO to NATO to the Warsaw Pact, Cominterm and the Common Market cum European Union. All were creatures of the Cold War.

It usurped Western culture, which in turn diffused throughout the world. In American schools of the 1950s and early 1960s, kids “ducked and tucked” under their desks against atomic blasts. When they grew up, they explored the trade-offs between guns and butter in Economics 101. They were fluent in the lexicon of confrontation:
containment, mutually assured destruction,
the
domino theory.
Everyone knew about the nuclear button, the “hotline” between Washington and Moscow, the briefcase, aka the football, the satchel of nuclear codes that to this day accompanies the president everywhere. The Cold War was hip: James Bond,
The Third Man,
Graham Greene, John le Carré, Tom Clancy. It was the stuff of pop-culture thrillers
and avant-garde films:
Z, State of Siege, Dr. Strangelove.
It wasn't enough to be merely American. The best and the brightest were all-American—patriots, not pinkos. The Cold War was counterculture, too. The Generation Gap. The antiwar activists of the Vietnam era. Rock 'n' roll grew up as a protest song against the Cold War.

We told ourselves that we won it. But it is equally fair to say that we also lost it, or at least shared amply in the loss. Clearly and simply, the Cold War was a catastrophe. Seldom in history had a conflict lasted so long, swept up so much of the world and cost so dearly. Within a few decades, as living memory dies, the Cold War will seem as distant as the Thirty Years' War. We will read about it as ancient history, much as we read about the battles of the kings and princes of 1648. We will forget that this greatest of the world's conflicts came at a commensurate cost, perhaps because we perceive ourselves to be the uncompromised victors and have never had to fully reckon the magnitude of the expense: how much treasure we expended, how economies were distorted, how we ourselves and our societies were changed by a half century's obsession. Our view is Churchill's, not Gorbachev's, when in truth it should be both.

Some have attempted an accounting, a Cold War “butcher's bill,” if you will. Focusing purely on defense expenditures, the Brookings Institution in 1998 performed a so-called Nuclear Audit. Since atomic weapons constituted the backbone of Cold War deterrence and absorbed the lion's share of resources for military research, it was thought that the amount of money devoted to them would serve as a revealing index of the nation's sacrifice. By that reckoning, the United States between 1940 and 1996 spent $5.8 trillion (in constant 1995 dollars) on nuclear weapons and infrastructure. How much is that? According to Brookings, a stack of a billion $1 bills would rise about eighty miles. A trillion would tower 79,000 miles. As for nearly 6 trillion—the stack would reach the moon, encircle it and reach roughly a quarter of the way back. Put another way, the researchers estimated, the amount would paper every state east of the Mississippi, with enough left over to cover half the American West, including Texas. Put yet another way, it exceeds the amount of all outstanding mortgages on all homes and buildings in the country. It is roughly half of U.S. GDP—the amount Americans spend every year on everything
from chewing gum and iPods to second homes in Vail. If you throw in military spending in the round—unfair, yes, but only partly since the Cold War inflated all defense spending, establishing a base that governs today—that total would balloon to $51.6 trillion, according to Brookings.

How to even begin to count the human cost? The Korean War claimed the lives of 32,629 American soldiers and approximately 3 million Korean civilians. One of every ten Americans who served in Vietnam became a casualty: 58,148 died and 304,000 were wounded. An estimated 1.2 million Vietnamese were killed over seven years of fighting. Half a million people died in Angola's twenty-seven-year civil war, waged among factions variously backed by the Soviets or the United States. The decade-long civil war in El Salvador, waged between Cold War proxies—leftist guerrillas versus a U.S.-backed military junta and its infamous “death squads”—claimed 75,000 dead. A similar conflict raged in neighboring Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, taking some 200,000 lives. Such numbers pale next to the 30 million Chinese who died in Mao's Cultural Revolution, or the million or so who perished in Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide, or the 30 million who died in Stalin's wars and purges. These events, too, grew out of the Cold War and are part of its dark heritage.

The symbol of all this was the Berlin Wall, the grim icon to half a century of human misery, oppression, struggle and hope.

For most Germans, as for most others, 1989 came out of the blue. That winter, on the cusp of the year that would change the world, there seemed almost no impetus for change. Only the most romantic West Germans dreamed of a day when the Wall might fall. Certainly Chancellor Helmut Kohl did not, nor any of his advisers that I spoke to. Neither did his foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for all his talk of
Ostpolitik,
who, in an interview with
Newsweek
at the time, dismissed Thatcher's and Reagan's harder-line advisers as “people who stick to the old enemy images and act as if nothing has changed or could ever change.”

Virtually no one even spoke (except rhetorically in the most hazy future tense) of
Wiedervereinigung,
or reunification. Politicians might steadfastly refuse to recognize Germany's division, at least officially.
Yet most Germans were perfectly at ease with it. Everywhere, there was a cocoonlike sense of self-sufficiency, a basic contentment with the idea of two Germanys and a resistance to the continued pretense that there was only one. West Germans described themselves as just that—West Germans, or “Europeans,” hardly German at all. Polls documented this sense of estrangement. In 1983, 43 percent of German students under the age of twenty-one described their titular East German brethren as
Ausländer,
or foreigners. In the summer of 1985, Allensbach researchers asked how long people thought the Berlin Wall would stand. The average response: thirty-four years. Amid the tens of thousands of documents released by the government Office on Intra-German Affairs concerning Deutsche Einheit, 1989–90, there was almost no discussion or evidence of planning for eventual unification. The topic was not verboten; it simply seemed… irrelevant.

I brought this up one night in February in a smoky bar in Kreuzberg, then West Berlin's bohemian district. A framed photo from the 1950s showed the establishment's patrons, East and West Berliners, casually sharing a beer over the little picket fence that then demarcated the border. A glossy bit of nostalgia, scoffed the member of the Berlin parliament who had brought me to the place. “We may talk about reunification,” he said, “but that doesn't mean we want it.” Foreigners from Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, many of them ethnic Germans who had paid their way out of captivity or been bought out by the West German government to the tune of some $10,000 a head, were flooding into Germany—three hundred thousand in 1988 alone. Imagine what it would be like without the Wall? The lawmaker shuddered at the thought.

In the East, meanwhile, life went on. Crossing over, I always felt as though I were entering a parallel universe—familiar in its essential lineaments, with cars and streetlights and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, yet somehow dimmer, drearier, shabbier and indefinably oppressive. At Checkpoint Charlie, there was always the same tedious routine, sometimes lasting hours. You would join a long queue, shuffling slowly forward. East German guards rummaged through every paper, wrote down every telephone number. What would I be doing? Who would I be seeing? Drivers leaving East
Berlin were ordered to open the trunk and hood of their car; guards inserted a probe into the gas tank to ensure that it contained only gasoline and not would-be escapees. Before the war, Berlin was always famous for its Berliner
Luft,
its fresh and invigorating air. Once in the East, that sense of lightness would instantly vanish. The air suddenly felt heavier, constricting. East Berliners referred to it as “sticky,” something that clung to you, vaguely menacing.

This was the effect of a police state. The German Democratic Republic under its leader for life Erich Honecker, the man who oversaw the actual erection of the Wall and who wanted to be known to his people as Papi, however deadly his instincts, was the most rigidly controlled, totalitarian state in the East bloc with the possible exception of Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. The secret police, the infamous Stasi, were ubiquitous. They could be your neighbors, your friends, even your family. Citizens were seduced, suborned, blackmailed and coerced into working for them. If you fell sick, vital medication might be withheld until you cooperated by informing on those you worked with or knew in private. If you wished to travel abroad, attend university or be promoted, you made a compact with the devil: collaborate, or pay the price. “The Stasi targeted everyone,” writes Alexandra Richie in her aptly titled
Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin,
from miners and waitresses to Intourist guides, musicians and kindergarten teachers. Files were kept on more than 6 million people. The regime's infamous Order No. 2, introduced by Stasi chief Erich Mielke in 1985 after Gorbachev came to power, directed the secret police to “prevent, discover and combat” all underground political activity using all means. Dissidents, critics and even mere moaners, Richie notes, were “checked, followed and documented in files which were regularly updated” in a campaign of “total information.” By its own official count, the regime at the end of its life had 97,000 employees and 173,000 informers. In a nation of 17 million, that translates to one in every sixty-three people working for state security. No wonder the air felt sticky. No wonder politics was taboo as a topic of conversation. No wonder no one trusted anyone—fathers or sons, mothers or daughters, lovers.

From time to time, I would go to a small private restaurant named Papillon, one of a handful in East Berlin, where I would casually talk
to locals. One evening I met a trio of young musicians, a pair of young men and a girl. They spoke quietly with bowed heads, as if fearing to be overheard. “We don't have feelings of nationalism,” said one of the men, echoing his compatriots in the West. “Why not two nations? It works fine.” His biggest regret was not the presumed impossibility of unification, nor even necessarily East Germany's low living standards. He chaffed at his inability to travel, as if the country's leaders sincerely believed their world would collapse if citizens were allowed to move freely. This truly irked him, to the point of deep alienation. Would he come back if he was allowed to visit the West? “Of course,” he replied. “I only want to see it, not live there. This is my home.” Then two men sat down at the next table and lit cigarettes, and the atmosphere changed. “Socialism must be preserved,” the young man said abruptly, speaking suddenly more loudly. And for the first time the girl opened her mouth. “Honecker is right,” she exclaimed, also rather too loudly. The men at the next table looked at us, ignoring the waitress who asked if she could serve them, and my companions got up and left.