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Fall of Berlin Wall

 Just two days ago, the free world remembered and celebrated that night the Berlin wall came down on November 9, 1989.   I remember sitting in my living room and watching, thinking it was a joke or some kind of hoax.  When I realized what was happening I began crying tears of joy as I watched the people celebrate.


I was  writing opinion columns for the Springfield News-Leader at that time so I was acquainted with the events surrounding the wall and the political unrest and especially the deaths of those who had tried to scale the wall without success.


My mind went back immediately to June 12, 1987 when once again I sat transfixed before the television screen to watch President Reagan’s motorcade take him to the historic Brandenburg Gate where tens of thousands of people awaited.  He later wrote in his diary there were “people stretching as far as I could see”.


In his speech that day he said, “Standing (here) before the Brandenburg gate (today), every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.”


“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. Gorbechev, open this gate!  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”


On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. A few days earlier, representatives from 11 Soviet republics (Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) met in the Kazakh city of Alma-Ata and announced that they would no longer be part of the Soviet Union. Instead, they declared they would establish a Commonwealth of Independent States. Because the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) had already declared their independence from the USSR, only one of its 15 republics, Georgia, remained. 


The once-mighty Soviet Union had fallen, largely due to the great number of radical reforms that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years as the leader of the USSR. However, Gorbachev was disappointed in the dissolution of his nation and resigned from his job on December 25. It was a peaceful end to a long, terrifying and sometimes bloody epoch in world history.  (Last two paragraphs quoted directly from History.com website.)

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