The Wall’s Fall: 20 Years Later

“. . . Tear down this wall!!”

You may have read or heard those words spoken by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. He was standing in front of the Brandenberg Gate in West Germany. Two years later, citizens of East Germany surged around the Berlin Wall. They swung sledgehammers, punching holes in the wall and dismantling its division of their city . . . at last.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. This dramatic destruction of perhaps the most well-known symbol of the Cold War signaled a change once thought impossible. The politics that had guided the actions of the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allied nations were changing dramatically.

Reagan Increases the Pressure

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he assumed an aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union. The Reagan Doctrine provided political and financial support to anti-communist resistance groups in many countries. The U.S. also increased its military budget. President Reagan believed that the Soviet economic system was not a match for his higher levels of military spending. His intent was to put financial pressure on communism.

Reagan also opened diplomatic talks with Soviet leaders to reduce the number of nuclear missiles installed in NATO and Warsaw Pact countries. The Soviets refused to negotiate. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985 however, he showed a willingness to discuss the matter. Gorbachev was concerned that Reagan’s military buildup was putting a strain on the Soviet economy. The two leaders signed their first arms reduction treaty in 1987. Gorbachev then felt confident that the economic strain from military spending was less of a concern. Gorbachev took other steps to change the Soviet system to allow satellite nations more freedoms.

Change Accelerates

George H.W. Bush replaced Reagan as the U.S. president in 1989. Bush continued to negotiate arms reduction with Gorbachev, who continued to spread power away from Moscow. Increased political freedoms caused political revolutions to occur from Estonia to Lithuania, in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Eventually all of the Eastern European countries that formed the majority of the Warsaw Pact became independent. In late 1989, East Germany’s government was overthrown. On the night of November 9, 1989, the Soviet guards opened the gates that had separated the city of Berlin since 1961. A few days later, bulldozers completed the destruction of the wall that had begun with Germans swinging sledgehammers.

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ABC News

Since the Fall

Before another year had passed, East and West Germany ceased to exist, just as East and West Berlin had. Germany had been reunited. What had once seemed impossible a few years before was now real. Gorbachev announced the end of the Soviet Union itself in December of 1991. Each of the fifteen Soviet republics had already declared their independence from the central Soviet government in Moscow. Today there is a memorial for one of the gates between East and West Germany in its original location, but the wall itself is history.