EDITORIAL: The Wall (11/14/99)

EDITORIAL

The Wall

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" - President Ronald Reagan, speaking in Berlin on June 12, 1987.

"We are here today to celebrate the ideal we cherish above all others - human freedom - and to celebrate the day that ideal triumphed in one city in the heart of Europe." - President Bill Clinton, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a speech at Georgetown University on November 8, 1999.

Ten years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. Much has been written this past week in various newspapers and magazines about that fateful day when the wall - the tangible concrete and metal manifestation of the Iron Curtain that had divided East from West since 1945 - was breached. On November 9, 1989, East Germans began streaming through the wall. The people who crossed to the other side on that day were not killed by border guards as were the more than 450 who had attempted to escape westward in the 28 years since the Berlin Wall had been erected.

The year 1989 - now referred to as the year that communism collapsed - truly was remarkable: Solidarity came to share power in Poland, Hungary opened its borders to the West, Czecho-Slovakia underwent its Velvet Revolution, and Rumania's Ceausescu was ousted. But the beginning of the end of communism actually came earlier.

It was in 1987 that Mikhail Gorbachev's twin policies of glasnost and perestroika , soon to be followed by "demokratizatsia," emboldened the captive peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. The following year brought a series of mass public meetings in Ukraine that demonstrated independent political activity after a longer period of political "stagnation." In April of 1988 a public meeting in Kyiv to mark the second anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster called for "openness and democracy to the end." Soon thereafter, at a public meeting in July, came the launch of the Democratic Front to Promote Perestroika. And the meetings continued - gatherings focused on ecological matters, political issues, and human and national rights - despite the authorities' attempts to prevent them from taking place.

In 1989 the public meetings continued, and the support base of the rights movements expanded greatly. Rukh, then known as the Popular Movement of Ukraine for Perebudova (the Ukrainian word for perestroika) was born. And so it went. Looking back now, it seems that major events came in quick succession: Ukraine's declaration of state sovereignty in 1990, the proclamation of independence on August 24, 1991, and its overwhelming confirmation by the populace in December 1 of that year...

Yes, communism was dying ...

Nonetheless, even today there are those in Ukraine who seek to turn back the clock to the days when they were "provided for." We can only hope that the wise Ukrainian nation, having seen where it has been, will not take a step backward but will look to the future as the world marks 10 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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