At a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder declared: “The wall fell from east to west, pushed down by brave and fearless East Germans.” This was true enough, but the initial and decisive challenge to Erich Honecker’s regime—and to the Berlin Wall that he helped build—came not from within East Germany, certainly not from East Berlin, but from the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union could survive as a superpower only if it undertook reforms that might make it more modern, dynamic, and efficient. This was the motivation behind his daring policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring). He expected that Russia’s renewal would be emulated by the governments of the other East-bloc states, some of which, most notably Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, were facing serious domestic opposition to communist rule. He was convinced that timely reforms would not only strengthen the communist governments of Eastern Europe but also tie them more tightly to Moscow. At the same time, in an abrupt departure from the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which called for military intervention against antigovernmental insurgencies in the satellite countries, he made it clear that the Soviet Union would not use force to prop up communist regimes that had lost the support of their people. East-bloc nations were now free to map their own path to socialist progress. (This new approach was labeled by Gorbachev’s America-expert, Gennady Gerasimov, the “Sinatra Doctrine”—as in “I Did It My Way.”) Of course, Gorbachev never dreamed that his plan to strengthen communism at home and abroad through timely reforms from above would ignite a revolt from below that would ultimately bring the whole system down. Like the proverbial Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he set in motion a process he could not control.
Erich Honecker wanted no part of Gorbachev’s reforms. He instinctively distrusted openness, and he considered economic restructuring unnecessary in his country, which after all was the most prosperous in the East bloc. He believed that the Soviet leader, rather than handing out advice, should be taking pointers from
In addition to financial help from the other German state, Honecker had the advantage of a relatively weak domestic opposition. Unlike some of his Eastern European counterparts, he did not face serious questioning of his party’s right to rule. As the self-proclaimed legatee of Germany’s leftist resistance to Hitler, the SED stood on a pedestal of historical virtue. Various dissidents might criticize this or that party policy, but they rarely contested the validity of Communist authority. Critics who did go too far, of course, could be sold off to the Federal Republic at a handsome profit to the regime. In the mid-1980s, of all the communist governments ordained by Stalin in the years after World War II, the one in East Germany seemed the most solid.
