Memória Virtual

Freedom!

For 28 years it had stood as the symbol of the division of Europe and the world, of Communist suppression, of the xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life — the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then — poof! — it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but gone as an effective barrier between East and West, opened in one unthinkable, stunning stroke to people it had kept apart for more than a generation. It was one of those rare times when the tectonic plates of history shift beneath men’s feet, and nothing after is quite the same.

(Time – edição datada de 20.11.1989 – publicada a 14.11.1989)

When Gorbachev first spoke of “new thinking” in foreign policy, many in the West — especially in the U.S. — doubted his sincerity. The real test was whether Gorbachev would end the policy at the heart of the cold war: the subjugation of Eastern Europe. At the end of last year, in a speech at the United Nations, Gorbachev declared that he would. “Freedom of choice is a universal principle,” he said. Yet the doubts lingered. They always seemed to come down to the question: Is Gorbachev for real?

There can be only one answer now: yes, emphatically yes. Earlier this year, after Poland’s Communists lost the most open elections since World War II but tried nevertheless to thwart Solidarity’s effort to form a government, Gorbachev spoke by phone to the Communist Party leader, who subsequently backed down. Gorbachev has also provided public approval to the Hungarian reformers. In summing up a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bucharest last July, he pronounced: “Each people determines the future of its own country and chooses its own form of society. There must be no interference from outside, no matter what the pretext.”

(Time, edição datada de 06.11.1989 – publicada a 31.10.1989)

For the Russians, tempered by centuries of land invasions, national security has long been defined as the control of territory and the subjugation of neighbors. Moscow’s desire for a protective buffer, combined with a thousand- year legacy of expansionism and a 20th century overlay of missionary Marxism, was what prompted Stalin to leave his army in Eastern Europe after World War II and impose puppet regimes in the nations he had liberated. […]

“These changes we’re seeing in Eastern Europe are absolutely extraordinary,” George Bush told the New York Times last week. In fact, 1989 will be remembered not as the year that Eastern Europe changed but as the year that Eastern Europe as we have known it for four decades ended. The concept was always an artificial one: a handful of diverse nations suddenly iron- curtained off from their neighbors and force-fed an unwanted ideology. Soviet dominion over the region may someday be regarded as a parenthetical pause (1945-89) that left economic scars but had little permanent impact on the culture and history of Central Europe. […]

(Time, edição datada de 06.11.1989 – publicada a 31.10.1989)

The wall was illegal, immoral and strangely revealing—illegal because it violated the Communists’ solemn contracts to permit free movement throughout the city; immoral because it virtually jailed millions of innocent people; revealing because it advertised to all the world the failure of East Germany’s Communist system, and the abject misery of a people who could only be kept within its borders by bullets, bayonets and barricades.

(Time – edição datada de 25.08.1961)

The scream of sirens and the clank ot steel on cobblestones echoed down the mean, dark streets. Frightened East Berliners peeked from behind their curtains to see military convoys stretching for blocks. First came the motorcycle outriders, then jeeps, trucks and buses crammed with grim, steel-helmeted East German troops. Rattling in their wake were the tanks — squat Russian-built T-34s and T-54s. At each major intersection, a platoon peeled off and ground to a halt, guns at the ready. The rest headed on for the sector border, the 25-mile frontier that cuts through the heart of Berlin like a jagged piece of glass. As the troops arrived at scores of border points, cargo trucks were already unloading rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts, wooden horses, stone blocks, picks and shovels. When dawn came four hours later, a wall divided East Berlin from West for the first time in eight years.

(Time – edição datada de 25.08.1961)