Politics and Contemporary History in Germany – Background

With his policy of “perestroika”, Michael Gorbachev wanted to renew socialism in the Soviet Union. In 1989 he warned the East German leadership, which viewed him with scepticism, “Life punishes those who come too late”. While the comrades in East Berlin refused to hear this admonition, the people preferred to abandon the red flag right away. The regime could only look on helplessly. A short time later, the GDR was history. But the days of Gorbachev and the USSR were also numbered.

When in 1985 Michael Gorbachev took office as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he had big plans. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the renunciation of socialism. On the contrary, the aim of his program of “perestroika” and “glasnost” was to breathe new life into socialism and lead it out of the disastrous political and economic stagnation in which the Soviet Union and its “brother nations” had been stuck for decades.

From the “Brezhnev” to the “Sinatra” doctrine

Events in Poland, where the government could ward off the mass protests initiated in the early 1980s by the labor union Solidarność only by the imposition of martial law (December 13, 1981), were the prelude to the last act of communist rule in Eastern Europe. In spring 1989 the Polish leadership came to an agreement with representatives of Solidarność on arrangements for the first free elections to be held in Poland since before the Second World War. This sealed the fate of the Communist Party’s autocratic rule – a signal for all of Eastern Europe.

The turning point in Poland and the impending dissolution of the Soviet-dominated “Eastern Bloc” was made possible by Gorbachev’s declared renunciation in 1988 of the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, which declared the “limited sovereignty” of the socialist states and had been in effect since 1968. It retrospectively justified, for instance, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 to crush the “Prague Spring”. The Brezhnev Doctrine was replaced after 1989 by the “Sinatra Doctrine”, an allusion to the song “I Did It My Way”, which conceded the socialist brother states fully sovereign authority to go their “own way”.

GDR 1989 – grotesque celebration at the end

At the East Berlin Communist Party headquarters, however, where the phrase “To learn from the Soviet Union is to learn how to win” had been repeated like a mantra in the past, no one wanted to hear of glasnost and perestroika. The path taken by the East Germany should, in the view of Erich Honecker’s government, continue to be the one tenaciously taken since the founding of the GDR. The celebration for the 40th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic and the transmission of the military parades on GDR television showed the world just how far the stiff-necked leaders of the “workers’ and farmers’ state” had removed themselves from reality in the past decades.

It would anyhow have probably been too late to gain control of the disintegration into which the persistent whitewashing of the actually disastrous state of the country, especially its economy, had long been leading the GDR. In the course of the year more and more people joined the protests of the democracy movement. The mass exodus over the border between Hungary and Austria, which had been opened since September 11, 1989, and the departure of many East German citizens that had sought asylum, for instance, in the Prague Embassy of West Germany, accelerated the Socialist Unity Party’s inexorable loss of power, which finally led to the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. As early as March 18, 1990, the first free elections in East Germany took place. Less than six months later, on October 3, 1990, the five states newly founded in the territory of the GDR joined the Federal Republic of Germany.

Coming to terms with the SED dictatorship

In all the Communist countries of the Eastern Bloc, the secret services of the State Security Ministry monitored with eagle eyes everything that could undermine even in the slightest way the power of the state. Unwanted opponents of the regime or those that were thought to be such, “refugees from the Republic” (as those who fled the GDR were known) and their helpers, faced draconic punishments. Those interested can see grim testimonials of how much people in East Germany suffered under repressive measures, and how inhuman the conditions of detention in the prisons of the State Security were, at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial Site.

On January 15, 1990, East German citizens stormed the central headquarters of the State Security in Berlin and so prevented the final destruction of a large number of documents that have since been an important source for coming to terms with the SED dictatorship.

The foiled coup of 1991 – the end of the Soviet Union In the Soviet Union on August 19, 1991, a group of putschists under the leadership of the Vice President of the USSR, Gennadi Janajew, and with the substantial involvement of the KGB, attempted to turn back the tide of history and overthrow Gorbachev. But reformist forces, rallied by Boris Jelzin, succeeded in fending off the coup. Still, Gorbachev’s time had expired. Three months later the Soviet Union was history.

“Controlled democracy”

The different courses of political development in East Germany and Russia since the demise of the GDR and the USSR are reflected by, among other things, the fact that proof of having been a high-ranking member of the SED or the Ministry for State Security generally puts an end to a political career in Germany.

In Russia, on the other hand, the first democratically elected President, Boris Jelzin, had been a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU and a candidate for the Politburo. And he was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, who, when he could no longer stand for the office of the President after two terms, was replaced by his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, only later again to exchange posts with him.

In Germany, the states newly founded on the territory of the former GDR have been able to slip under the roof of a federal democratic system. In Russia, the “controlled democracy” still has a good way to go before it has really overcome the old structures of domination. There has still been no reappraisal of the history of the KGB.