John Roughan: Tearing down the Iron Curtain, again

Journalism gets to write not only the first draft of history, but sometimes also the second. The second draft of communism's collapse, written for this week's anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been a vast improvement on the first.

Nowhere did I read this time that the West won the Cold War with superior military spending. That was the accepted wisdom of 1989, and the years after. Western intelligence agencies, geopolitical analysts and crusty commentators in the weekly news magazines all solemnly decided the Soviet Union simply hadn't been able to keep pace with Ronald Reagan in the arms race.

I used to wonder whether the experts had ever really been behind the Iron Curtain. They might have spent time at Moscow embassies and visited the Kremlin, but they cannot have engaged ordinary Russians in conversation, or kept their eyes open.

I'd had my suspicions about Western intelligence ever since 1978, when I'd taken the Trans-Siberian to Europe. The journey was an epiphany for someone who had grown up with the conventional information of the Cold War. Communism up close was far worse than I'd imagined, but also far weaker.

Not militarily weaker. Many a night I heard the low rumble of a passing train, and looked out my window to see a ghostly outline of tanks being transported towards China. I suppose that is the sort of thing spies can report.

By day, I shared the compartment with people who loved to talk and laugh at the lies they had to live by. They weren't scared: Stalinism had long gone. Fear had given way to an all-pervasive cynicism, because nothing worked as it should, nobody had any incentive to do anything about it, and there was no foreseeable escape.

I remember a young guy in a Moscow bar, a bit bohemian like me in those days. "Do you know what it's like in the West?" I asked him. "Yes," he said heavily. "We know."

The place was a prison - dull, dysfunctional and dispirited. I suppose it was hard to factor that into intelligence reports.

But the second draft of history this week went too far the other way, implying too much predictability in events. An article by Christian Caryl in the magazine Foreign Policy said, "the CIA was decidedly behind the curve", because "it consistently failed to deduce Gorbachev's true intentions".

Interestingly, for my long-held suspicions, the piece also mentioned that "when the Berlin Wall came down, and the White House demanded information, the embarrassed US spies had to admit they had no agents in place in East Berlin, or the Kremlin".

Yet deducing Gorbachev's true intentions would not have helped anyone very much. It is clear in his books that Mikhail Gorbachev genuinely did not intend to cause the avalanche he started.

He, like many socialists in the West, believed communism would be fine if it would just lighten up. Gorbachev fatally introduced free speech, in the hope that open criticism would be all the incentive Soviet man would need to knuckle down, curb his drinking and do an honest day's work.

Second drafts are written in nostalgia, and they look for heroes. Beside Gorbachev, they chose Pope John Paul II, who might have been an inspiration to his native Poland, but whose role was hardly pivotal.

Communism collapsed because it couldn't survive free speech. Collectivism left too much to be desired. But nobody could have predicted the collapse would come when it did, as suddenly as it did.

One day Hungary opened its border with Austria, the next day East Germans were making a round-trip West. Within a week, a leak had become a torrent. East Germany's Stalinist regime resigned, and a new one announced it would open the Wall. On foot and in cars, people poured through. Overnight they began tearing it down.

No government anywhere was prepared for the speed of it all. From Bonn and Washington there were appeals for East Germans to stay at home. It was one of those rare moments in history when popular will moves too fast for leadership.

But it wasn't inevitable. Nothing is. As sick as communism was, it had been so for 40 years. The Wall, put up in 1961, had been its admission of failure. But had its guards reacted differently in 1989, history would be different. Tiananmen Square happened that year.

When it came to the crunch, Gorbachev would not use the Soviet forces that still garrisoned Eastern Europe. That was the crucial decision. He is deservedly a hero of the second draft.

He looked as modest as ever at the anniversary this week, and content with the passage of events. When the late 20th century recedes more clearly into historical perspective, I suspect his stature will be greater still.

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Did anyone notice the All Black halfback Brendan Leonard take a fairly severe kick in the head last weekend? It was accidental and excusable but, as the television commentators briefly recalled, Colin Meads was sent off for less. I'm proud that we're not Welsh about these things.