Peaceful End to Cold War Still Gives Me the Shivers

All the focus this week on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has me reliving those moments of 1989, and what effect the toppling of the Soviet empire had on me.

I’m sure to anyone younger than 20 or 30, the fall of the wall seems like ancient history – no more or less relevant to their lives than the Civil War or Great Depression.

But I remember the Cold War as a cold reality:

• The very real danger of US/USSR Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), particularly during the presidency of that war monger Ronald Reagan who, contrary to revisionist myth, is hardly responsible for the wall coming down
• Posters in my church about how many schools could be built for the cost of one hydrogen bomb
• Protesting with Nebraskans for Peace at a missile silo near Scottsbluff and seeing a plain-clothes official photographing all of the license plates of cars parked at the site (hopefully, my dad, who’s car I drove, wouldn’t get in trouble for my subversive activities)
• The night in 1983 when the Religion in Life group at Nebraska Wesleyan University got together and watched the terrifying and controversial television show, The Day After, about how serious a nuclear war would be – by then we’d figured out that ducking and covering under our desks wouldn’t be much protection

Yep, the Cold War was real, and it was scary. September 11, 2001 was horrifying to be sure, but what we feared about the Cold War, the destruction of the entire world with only minutes of warning, was terror on a different scale.

I grew up thinking that the Cold War could only end with terrible violence and destruction. It was unthinkable that the Soviet Block would just implode of its own weight (no thanks to Ronnie) and the desire of its people to be free. As wide-eyed East Berliners walked through the Brandenburg gate to West Berlin, I held my breath, waiting for those tanks which had always crushed freedom movements in the past. Only a few months earlier, a huge, hopeful, peaceful protest for freedom had been brutally crushed at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, reinforcing my belief that communism wouldn’t, couldn’t, go away peacefully.

But with only a few arrests and smatterings of isolated violence, from Germany to Poland to Hungary to Russia itself, Communism evaporated without a war, without a nuclear attack. I still get the shivers when I think of it.

One of the lessons of 1989 is that governments and peoples can change peacefully. While China, North Korea, and Cuba are still not democratic, it is possible to imagine that some day they will be, and massacres at Tiananmen Square will not be automatically assumed.