Russia is building up troops along the border with Ukraine,
and conducting massive military drills.
Glory to Ukraine! - Glory to the heroes!
At ease.
We'll have another training now.
We all came together.
People, military, government, everybody.
People were ready for it on a genetic level.
This was not the first time in our history we were at risk of losing our statehood.
And I understood that this was the war.
The moment has come. This was the war for independence.
The war for Ukraine.
This weakness, which we'd had for many years,
it was gone.
We started fighting back.
Contact from the left.
Contact from the right.
A lot of people who took up arms to defend Ukraine,
they never pictured themselves with a gun in their arms.
So many people who are, you know, just artists, uh, activists, uh...
IT managers who just took up arms
and... and, uh, volunteered to go to the army.
We were waiting for this, and we're ready.
I knew it would happen because it's been going on for more than a century.
Seeing how passionate everyone is
to defend their country,
Ukraine is definitely not going down without a fight.
And how old are you? Seventeen years old.
I... I see that you're holding a weapon.
Yes, it's-- What kind of weapon?
It's, uh, an... AK-47 without magazine.
Okay. My magazine.
Okay, and... are you ready to kill another person?
Uh...
I mean, have you thought about that?
Uh, I think about that, but, um...
to me, what is it?
Duty.
It's my duty.
I was born under Soviet occupation, and this was the world I knew.
You couldn't go outside Soviet Union at that time.
You had to have a visa,
and it was not given to any regular people.
The Soviet authorities wanted you to feel that everybody is tapped,
everybody is listened to,
everything you say can be used against you.
It was a society of fear, really.
In 1989, Gorbachev was the head of Soviet Union,
and so we had the chance to travel to Eastern Germany.
That was a really big, big thing.
My father took me and my brother and my mother
to see the Brandenburg Gate.
And I remember he said,
"Children, breathe in deeply
because it's the air of freedom that comes from the other side."
Growing up in the '70s and the '80s,
there was a very strong sense that the Soviet Union was there forever.
We tried to learn as much as possible
about what it was like beyond the borders of the Soviet Union,
but there was also a sense that we would never, ever see it.
KGB agents collected data all the time, 24/7.
They forced people to collaborate with them secretly.
It was easy to make your life miserable.
There were Russian writers who defected.
Russian journalists occasionally defected.
And probably the most famous defector was the ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov,
who, uh, chose freedom and became a major, major star
not just in ballet, but in American theater writ large.
A friend of mine was sent to prison for many years,
almost for nothing.
Dancing to Western music. Jazz, rock and roll, I don't know.
A kind of dancing not allowed in the GDR.
It was clear to us that in this country,
under these conditions,
it will be impossible for us to live.
We were prisoners.
You have to remember that while the relationship
between Reagan and Gorbachev is hugely important,
and it yielded huge benefits in arms control to an easing of tensions,
it did not open the wall.
Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall.
What happened after Reagan said, "Tear down this wall," was nothing.
Mikhail Gorbachev did not open the wall.
President Reagan then leaves office,
and in 1989, we get George H.W. Bush.
A new breeze is blowing,
and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn.
For in man's heart, if not in fact,
the day of the dictator is over.
When Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union,
his view was not that he wanted to destroy the Soviet Union,
but that he wanted to reform it from within.
He wanted to give people a chance to speak.
This was glasnost.
Which is not just freedom of the press,
but which is also the openness of government to the people,
the accountability of government to the people.
That began to happen right after Chernobyl.
At Moscow University and across the Soviet Union,
there is a sense things are changing,
that the limits of permissible criticism are expanding.
Glasnost is a first step towards real democracy in our society.
He also wanted to make an effort
to address the failure of Soviet central planning.
The economy was teetering in the 1980s.
The overall impact of the arms race
and of the militarization of the Soviet economy
undermined the system
and also undermined the lives of many people.
The standard of living was not improving.
And that's where perestroika came in.
Gorbachev starts introducing economic reforms
like cooperative businesses, semi-capitalist businesses.
Perestroika means rebuilding,
and that has to do largely with economics, and to some extent politics.
Gorbachev, from above, opens the door to reform,
and when he gives an inch, suddenly everyone says, "Well, we want a mile."
And so you have protests springing up all across Central and Eastern Europe.
Very important in this context is Poland.
From the very beginning of the Cold War, Poland is a thorn in the Russians' side.
Poland is a country that has a whole tradition of resistance,
of insurrections against foreign rule.
In 1978, the Cardinal of Kraków,
Karol Wojtyla, is elected Pope John Paul II.
The Polish pope.
Unheard of.
Never happened before.
Popes are Italian or French.
One overriding fact about the Polish people is this.
In a nation of 35 million, 30 million, yes, 30 million,
believe in and adhere to the Roman Catholic Church.
This in a communist society that, on paper, is anti-Church.
When the pope comes to Poland,
millions of people are thronging the streets,
and the pope gives them a message of hope.
When the Polish pope comes to pay homage here,
no one doubts that he is challenging the official wisdom
about his country's character.
The pope didn't say, "Down with Big Brother."
He didn't have to.
It's as if the communist state
has ceased to exist for ten days.
Vast crowds turn out.
Mass prayers, hymns. God save Poland.
That prepares the ground for the wave of strikes in August 1980.
An extraordinarily brave group of people in Poland
formed a group known as Solidarity.
SOLIDARITY
Solidarity began as a labor union,
as a trade union movement,
seeking better wages and working conditions
in the dockyards of Gdańsk.
And Solidarity's leader is a man named Lech Walesa.
Lech Walesa is a very earthy shipyard worker, trade union leader.
Big, bristling mustache. Very bluff personality.
I think you have heard the situation we are currently in,
that is...
experts, that is the two sixes, the government along with ours,
they debate, that is, they already agree
on specific things in the third and fourth points.
And he has an incredible natural political instinct.
A reported 100,000 workers
in some 140 different industries and factories
are now on strike in communist Poland.
They want more money and more freedom,
two items the government of communist party chief Edward Gierek
will be hard-pressed to grant.
The communist regime caves in
and concedes something that has never been conceded
in the entire history of the communist world since 1917,
which is an independent self-governing trades union.
Solidarity.
And this becomes a ten-million-strong opposition movement.
A national liberation movement.
There was a very real concern
that the Soviets were going to invade Poland because of Solidarity
and their view that the Poles had not acted strongly enough.
On the 13th of December, 1981,
the Poles woke up to a grim-faced General Wojciech Jaruzelski on television
saying the situation in the country was anarchy, which wasn't true.
It had become so dramatic that he had to declare a state of war.
Poles look out of the window, and there were tanks on the streets.
But they're Polish tanks.
There had been enormous Soviet pressure on Jaruzelski to crack down.
Communist authorities raid a conference
of Solidarity's national leaders.
The entire presidium is arrested in its hotel.
There were a number of people who were killed,
particularly in the coal mines.
But a lot more people, most of my friends, were put into internment camps.
By imposing martial law, Jaruzelski avoided a Soviet invasion.
But he ended up with martial law anyway.
SOLIDARITY MAZOVIA
Solidarity survives as an underground organization.
There was very significant financial support from the West,
encouraged by Pope John Paul II, by the way, who said that was a good idea.
You basically had three very different institutions
committed to supporting Solidarity.
One was CIA in the United States.
The second was the AFL-CIO, the American labor movement.
And the third was the pope.
And we always felt that the pope probably had the best intelligence of anybody
on what was going on inside Poland because he had agents in every church.
There was never direct cooperation among those three,
but there were contacts at the very top.
We kind of all knew what we were doing with Solidarity,
so we didn't get crossways with each other.
The CIA began a modest operation
to give the underground leaders of Solidarity
the weapons that they needed to win.
And they were the tools of a free press.
We provided a lot of communications equipment,
a lot of printing presses, things like that for Solidarity.
The CIA developed the capability, that basically fit into a large suitcase,
that allowed us to take control of the Polish national television system
for about ten minutes,
and which we broadcast the itinerary
and where the pope was gonna be and when.
And millions of people turned out.
Yeah, we just took over the signal.
This had a galvanizing effect on people.
We will win! We will win! We will win!
This does not mean in any way, shape, or form
that the CIA pulled the strings of Solidarity.
Nothing of the kind.
Solidarity made its own strategy, but there was economic support.
Gradually, Solidarity and the communist government
come back to negotiations.
Which leads to the first semi-free election in Eastern Europe in 40 years
on the 4th of June, 1989.
Polish voters have seized the opportunity
to pass judgment through the ballot box on the apparatus which they say
has failed Poland in the past 40 years.
The Polish government tried very hard to destroy Solidarity,
but it lived, and it prevailed.
We were euphoric in Poland on the evening of the 4th of June, 1989.
We thought, "This is it. This is the moment."
We finally got that.
It's the beginning of the end of communism.
I come back to a newspaper office in Warsaw that evening,
and I see on a small black-and-white TV screen
the first footage of the people being killed
just off Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Tiananmen Square is where you have the Chinese Communist Party
using violence to defend itself.
This is the Deng Xiaoping era.
When Deng took over in '78,
China probably was the poorest country in East Asia.
And Deng said, "Market economy works."
"Open things up. Bring foreign investors in here."
"Let's send our people overseas."
Opening up to the West, opening up to the world.
8:30 in the morning,
and the crowds at the Xidan Department Store in Peking
made a rush for it once inside.
The standard of living in China is going up.
But the reform was not reform towards democratization.
It wasn't reform that, "We're now gonna open everything up,
and everybody will have a voice in the government,
and we'll listen to the majority of the people."
No, that wasn't Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping was a Leninist.
Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was undergoing reform.
We also wanted China to go through political reform.
College students in the '80s in China were fearless.
We needed to put more pressure on the government.
We started a hunger strike on May 13th.
Martial law was officially declared on May 19th, 1989.
After declaring martial law,
the government sent troops with tanks to make us leave Tiananmen Square.
The government did not expect for the people of Beijing
to all come out and block these tanks.
After martial law was declared, it did not achieve its purpose
until June 3rd,
when Deng Xiaoping decided to handle the situation through force.
It was the swift and terrible ending
to the Beijing spring of 1989.
Hundreds of thousands of students and workers
and other hopeful Chinese citizens who,
through their long demonstration for democracy,
had been seeking a peaceful dialogue with the leaders of this vast nation,
received instead the harshest of responses to their demands for reform and freedom.
Martial law forces came out shooting citizens and students,
forcibly opening up the streets
to finally occupy Tiananmen Square.
I had many classmates who were there.
They called telling us that the government opened fire, that people had died,
that people were collapsing on the ground, et cetera.
I saw the tanks that were burned down,
bikes that had fallen all over the ground, et cetera.
Many people died in 1989.
A doctor estimated the number of dead at 500.
The doctor said, "My government has gone mad."
One official government report characterized the massacre
as a glorious victory over counter-revolutionary turmoil.
From that day on,
everybody in Eastern Europe is talking about the Chinese solution.
The fear that there will be a violent crackdown,
which was a real danger.
And this becomes absolutely knife-edge in East Germany in October 1989.
East Germany, or by its more formal name,
the German Democratic Republic,
was in fact an undemocratic dictatorship.
It's run by a politburo, a small group of men,
and the general secretary of the politburo,
the person in charge, is Erich Honecker.
Erich Honecker, after Tiananmen Square,
instructed all media to have stories
praising how the Chinese had bravely restored order.
IN THE BATTLE OF OUR TIME, THE GDR AND THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
STAND SIDE BY SIDE
This was obviously a message to his own people. "Don't try anything."
Honecker is a hard-liner who's horrified by Gorbachev's reforms.
He believed in the iron fist.
After the liberation of our people from the yoke of fascism
by the glorious Soviet army,
and after the years of a difficult beginning,
we have constructed
a new beginning of a new socialist social order.
The world is divided
into the West and the East,
and these two worlds clash in Berlin.
And the symbol of that clash is the Berlin Wall.
I actually went to live in East Berlin.
What I discovered was an Orwellian state
where you really got, in a way, as close to 1984 as we've ever come.
That is to say that there was so much surveillance
by the East German secret police, the Stasi,
that they didn't need to use a lot of torture and violence
because they had the whole society under control.
I was always afraid in the East,
because you were at the mercy of the authorities here,
be it the police or perhaps later the Stasi.
The reason for the arrest was the accusation of espionage.
I thought, "Well, you'll just have to stay here for a few days
until everything gets sorted out."
Unfortunately, those few days turned into a total of nine months.
So we have down here in the basement
two padded cells.
Detention cells.
Prisoners were brought here
when they did not behave correctly.
People were imprisoned here in the dark,
until they felt calm, until they cooled down.
One prisoner seems to have been in this darkened cell
for 14 days in a row.
The Stasi collected documents about people.
No one knew whether one was one of these persons or not.
I wrote to my girlfriend in the West that there are no bicycle tubes,
and they had documented it.
Such a nonsense, such a small shit.
I filmed undercover.
There was one situation where I filmed in the backyard.
It was really empty, as dead as in Detroit.
Yes? Even half burned.
And then there were curtains moving.
And I filmed it.
Then a woman opened the curtain and said, "Film again!"
"Film in which kind of dirt we live in!"
"Show this to the world!"
I thought, "That's not possible. Are we living in the apocalypse?"
What was important
was Gorbachev had told his allies
that they are responsible for themselves.
That he will not be able to help them economically, financially.
But this was not good enough for the Eastern Europeans.
They needed money. They needed cooperation.
And this was helping to start this, uh, process of liberalization.
The pressure gradually comes up and up and up.
In the spring and early summer of 1989,
it became clear that there was more and more dissatisfaction in the GDR.
GDR people were allowed to travel
around the member countries of the Warsaw Pact.
So they could go from the GDR, let's say, to Hungary.
As more and more refugees abandon their cars...
So in the summer, hundreds of GDR folks had gone to Hungary
trying to figure out whether they could go from Hungary into Austria.
And Austria, of course, was part of the free world.
Barbed wire fence, a bit rusty, with a large hole in it.
We crawled through it, and there was a sign previously attached by locals
which said, "Austria/Vienna."
We fell into each other's arms
and I believe it was the most wonderful day of my life.
These young East Germans arrived here overnight,
determined to follow the trail west.
The overnight total...
They're constantly arriving.
I think 200 probably, something like this. We don't know exactly how many are coming.
Hungarians took a bold step at that moment and opened the fence,
and allowed hundreds of these "refugees" from East Germany to go west.
Faced with a choice between its Warsaw Pact obligations,
and better relations with the West, Hungary has chosen the West.
Hungary realizes that for the success of its economic reforms,
it really needs West German financial, economic, and political support.
It was astounding to me how fearless the young people were,
and the joy they found in taking this path.
You have a hemorrhage coming out,
particularly through Hungary at Austria, but then through Czechoslovakia.
And the East German authorities are coming on immense pressure
to do something about this.
Simultaneously, the East Germans are gaining their courage,
many of them saying, "I don't want to leave."
"I don't want to live in West Germany."
"I'm a Saxon or a Thuringian. I want to stay here."
And you start getting small demonstrations,
particularly in Leipzig and Dresden, with people saying, "Wir bleiben hier."
"We're staying here. We're not leaving."
The Church of St. Nicholas in central Leipzig,
focus of the growing dissident movement,
drew together its congregation from early in the day.
They had traveled here from all parts of East Germany.
By the time of evening prayers,
the aisles were packed here and at four other churches across the city,
a sign of the central role the Protestant clergy are playing
in the search for greater democracy.
This has always been debated.
How political is the Church or the clergy allowed to be?
Jesus said, "You have to be generous with your talents."
"You should use them, not bury them."
Which means our telephone can be used by the communications group.
With our printing machine, leaflets are printed.
STOP THE MONOLOGUE
The church gave us a roof over our heads.
On Mondays, there was a prayer for peace in the church.
And after that, going on the street.
To me, Leipzig has always been a very cosmopolitan city
because two times a year, they had a fair.
An international fair.
There was the international press.
And they managed to go to the street with a few hundred people,
straight out of the church.
FOR AN OPEN LAND WITH FREE PEOPLE
This banner was shown for five seconds,
then the Stasi took it away.
Hey!
Pigs!
Stasi out! Stasi out! Stasi out! Stasi out! Stasi out!
These demonstrations, they're gradually building up.
40 YEARS GDR
Good day, spectators from Berlin's Karl Marx Avenue.
The tenth hour has ended on this 7th of October,
which citizens of the German Democratic Republic
will celebrate in a variety of ways.
Against the backdrop of thousands of its desperate citizens
fleeing to the West,
the aging leadership of the East German Communist Party
threw a party today to celebrate their 40th year in power.
Among the honored guests
was the man who most symbolizes change in East Bloc nations,
Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
On the 7th of October, there were celebrations in East Berlin,
40 years of the GDR.
On the occasion of the anniversary of the GDR,
Erich Honecker and Mikhail Gorbachev have the opportunity
to continue their exchange of views
on questions of socialist construction in both countries.
"He did not specifically mention the refugee crisis,"
said a spokesman, "but he preached reform."
"A friendly warning from a leader who knows all too well
what happens to those who resist change."
I believe danger awaits those who do not react to the real world.
Honecker listened and responded
that he is working to strengthen his revolutionary ideals.
Translation, "I'll just keep doing it my way, thanks."
Erich Honecker and Gorbachev end up in conflict,
and it's embarrassing to the East German regime
because its own citizens are going on the street chanting, "Gorby, Gorby!"
Gorby! Gorby! Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!
GORBY, GORBY, HELP US!
They want more of that spirit. They want reforms.
And their own leader, Erich Honecker, doesn't want to deliver those.
It's now four hours since Gorbachev left Berlin,
and the police are still struggling to control crowds on the streets.
He said Gorbachev tried to show us the way, but Honecker rejected it.
The entire anniversary weekend has been marked by clashes
between police and demonstrators calling for a freer society.
October 7, the Day of the Republic,
there were flags and demonstrations and so on.
And I burst into tears.
I had a crying fit and thought, "Somebody has to change something."
And then I realized I have to go to this demonstration on October 9th.
The crucial moment is on October 9th in Leipzig,
where the tension was enormously high.
I made around 25 reports for Western television.
Ziggy Schefke and Aram Radomski,
they're basically working together with a friend in the West.
Their friend would smuggle them camera equipment and videotapes.
Their friend worked at a news channel,
then they would smuggle the tapes out and their friend would broadcast them.
And on the 9th of October, we drove to Leipzig.
And we passed military convoys.
We passed soldiers.
A huge military convoy with 20 trucks with soldiers.
And Aram said, "They're also going to Leipzig."
The East German regime thought about
carrying out a German Tiananmen Square.
In Leipzig in October 1989,
it made preparations to slaughter protesters.
HOSTILITY TO THE STATE SHALL NO LONGER BE TOLERATED
Members from state security made clear
they had been pressed to use weapons.
There was a huge military presence.
And that day I said to my neighbor, who was a policewoman,
"I'm going there today."
Then she said, "Are you stupid? I know they are shooting today."
I was totally scared.
We need to find a camera position.
Friends told us, “Ask the pastor of the Reformed Church
to let you into the church."
The caretaker brought us to the roof.
To the very top of it.
And we were lying there in the pigeon droppings.
For individual East Germans,
this is such a moment.
I remember a friend of mine telling me
that when she left her apartment to join the demo,
she had no idea whether anyone would join her.
And then at the next street corner, there was one other person.
And then two blocks down, there were two more people.
And then five blocks down, there were 15 more people.
And she suddenly realized it's gonna be okay,
because there are this many of us.
And it broke the barrier of fear.
We are the people! We are the people!
It was very moving to see so many people demonstrating together.
We are the people! We are the people! We are the people! We are the people!
You cannot imagine how powerful 70,000 people can scream.
"We are the people, Gorbachev, Gorbachev."
Gorby! Gorby!
There was silence between these chants.
The silence, and you just hear the steps of tens of thousands of people.
What the demonstrators wanted can best be read, from my point of view,
from the chants that had formed.
"Democracy, now or never."
This was chanted, "Democracy, now or never!"
Free elections. "Free elections! Free elections!"
And there are stairs, there was the headquarters of the Stasi.
The officers were standing behind the curtains.
And were looking at the demonstrators. And the demonstrators walked by.
And they put candles on the stairs.
A thousand candles.
Really, 1,000 candles standing there.
And this discipline. No one had a stone. No one.
Because no one threw a stone,
there was no reason for the government, the military, or police to react.
We want those that are standing opposite us,
we want to address them and not see them as opponents,
but talk to them and get them on our side.
So not saying, "Bloody cop."
But saying, "You are actually one of us."
"You feel the same way."
And shouting "No violence" was an essential appeal to the other side.
To our own people, but also to the opposite side.
Armed forces were standing at the ready.
The regime had already prepared hospital beds in the area.
And then somehow they said,
"We can't open fire on demonstrators who are clearly not throwing any stones
because they are carrying candles in one hand
and covering them with the other hand to keep candles from blowing out."
"We just can't shoot them."
I was on that steeple, and not with the demonstrators.
But this power that I felt up there,
200 stairs higher, that was really impressive.
And then Aram said, or I said,
"If this is broadcast in Western television tomorrow,
this will not only change Germany,
but also Europe and the whole world."
And we lay there in the pigeon shit.
But we could feel it, that this was a very special day.
VIDEOCASSETTE IS WRITE PROTECTED
It was almost always the same ritual.
You had to contact the diplomat who could easily go to the West
and give him the videocassette.
On that 9th of October,
he was in the revolving door of a big hotel.
I passed it to him in the door.
Then he sat in his Mercedes and drove to the West.
And that videocassette was gone. It was out of my hands.
And I waited another day for the pictures.
The demonstration began in the narrow, cobbled streets
in the center of the city,
where people seemed unworried by the menacing presence
of large numbers of plainclothes security men.
There seems to have been a fundamental change of attitude,
as people refuse to be intimidated by the communist leadership.
These were scenes unprecedented in the city's history.
Banners calling for free elections, free travel, and a free press,
and the people demanding new leadership.
You have to think about the power of images.
Because 95% of people in the GDR could watch Western television.
And that's who I wanted to reach.
Reach the undecided in the living rooms of the GDR.
I think that this big demonstration on October 9th
was the beginning of the end of the GDR.
Erich Honecker tried in Leipzig on October 9th, 1989,
to institute a Tiananmen local event, which failed.
And when that failed, the combination of his conflict with Gorbachev
and his loss of face with his other politburo colleagues
meant that he fell from power.
So he's ousted and replaced by Egon Krenz.
From that moment on,
there were larger and larger demonstrations
also in Berlin at the beginning of November.
So you have the pressure of all the people leaving.
You have the pressure of all the people protesting.
It's clear that the East German regime is crumbling,
and it's the size of those protests that inspires Egon Krenz to say,
"Hey, maybe I should throw these people a bone."
"Maybe I should give a press conference where I make it sound as if I'm going to,
you know, offer them some travel freedom."
"Maybe I should announce a few minor changes."
On November 9th, Egon Krenz decides to announce
these seemingly nice-sounding travel regulations
that are actually not that significant.
The problem is that the person he assigns to do the press conference,
Günter Schabowski, has no media skills whatsoever.
If you're a leader of a dictatorship, you don't need to develop media skills.
You just write the headlines yourself.
The regime didn't usually hold press conferences for Western journalists,
but they're there.
So Günter Schabowski starts off at 6:00 p.m.
He drones on about the minutiae of the party.
Contributions to discussions were generally
a complex wide range of topics.
Finally, at about five minutes to 7:00, Schabowski says,
"Wait, there's this announcement. You must all have a copy."
Even though no one does. And, "Let me-- let me read it to you."
Today, we have decided to introduce measures
permitting every citizen of the GDR
to leave for the federal republic by any crossing points.
Now what was on the piece of paper was, "You still need to apply."
But people heard "permission to cross the border."
Reporters are looking at each other and saying,
"We think he just opened the wall, but we're not sure."
And, so there's this sort of stunned silence.
One journalist, Daniel Johnson, stands up in the back of the room.
What will happen with the Berlin Wall now?
And Schabowski is like a deer in headlights.
With immediate effect, according to my knowledge.
And he says, "Straightaway."
And it's not true. He got it wrong.
But the world's press reports this.
In a news conference which ended just a few minutes ago in East Berlin,
government officials announced that communist East Germany
has now declared their border open with West Germany.
The Germans East and West heard Mr. Schabowski,
who speaks for the government, he's the media spokesman,
say there are no more borders.
That East Germans may cross to the West
over whatever existing border frontiers there are.
Will that wall itself, along the Brandenburg Gate
near Checkpoint Charlie, will those openings be open
for East Germans who want to come directly from East Berlin to West Berlin?
As we read the words of Mr. Schabowski,
the words that were read to the people here tonight, that is correct.
No one understood it.
Is he crazy, is he insane?
Aram and I said, "We go to Bornholmer Street now."
We will go to the checkpoint at Bornholmer Street
and see what's going on.
If we don't come back within two hours, we are in the West.
Or we got arrested.
And then we arrived there. Twenty people were standing there.
And Aram went to the border guard
and he said, "We want to talk to the boss."
He looked at us, "What do you want?"
"We want to talk to the boss."
Harald Jäger is the person who is in charge at the border crossing,
so he's the senior Stasi officer on the night shift.
He's watching the press conference inside the border crossing.
He screamed at the television, "That is all bullshit. I have no orders."
"I'm here at the border, and no one has told me any of this."
"This is not true. I don't know what's going on."
Then someone came, a man named Major Jäger,
and Aram told him,
"Immediately and promptly, we are allowed to go to the West."
And then he went to the phone in his barrack.
He called his superiors, "I've got ten people. What am I doing?"
They said, "Business as usual."
I ask you in the interest of order and security...
to leave the area in front of the checkpoint.
This is mass disinformation! I could have stayed at home and slept.
Jäger called again. "I've got 100 people!"
"Business as usual." "I've got 200 people!"
"Business as usual." And he said--
You know, he just got angrier and angrier at being left in the lurch.
Open! Open! Open!
He calls again, and finally his superior officers say,
"All right, since you're annoying us so much,
here's something you can do."
"Take the loudest, most obnoxious protesters who are, you know,
really pushing it to get into the border crossing,
bring them in, take their passports, put a stamp over their face,
and then let them out the other side to the west."
"By putting a stamp over their faces, you have expelled them forever."
"You have withdrawn their citizenship of East Germany."
We gave him our ID.
And he stamped it.
And we were allowed to pass. And we crossed this bridge.
And we were the only ones.
You have to imagine that, totally crazy.
And I said to Aram, "What are they going to do now?"
And he said, "They will shoot us down."
I said, "No, they will not shoot us down."
"They will arrest us and take us to prison."
And we crossed the bridge. And there was no West-Berlin police.
There was nothing.
We were standing in front of a Mercedes taxi.
I said, "This must be the West because there is a Mercedes taxi."
And I said this to the driver.
"Yes," he said, "You are in West Berlin."
At about 10:40 p.m.,
a hugely respected West German TV anchorman,
silver-haired Hanns Joachim Friedrichs,
says, "The gates in the wall are standing wide open."
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
One should be cautious with superlatives. They tend to wear out fast.
But this evening it is permissible to risk one.
This 9th of November is a historic day.
The GDR has announced that its borders are open to everyone as of now.
The gates in the wall are wide open.
It wasn't true. They weren't yet wide open.
Back at the Bornholmer Street station,
of the people he lets out, most of them, you know,
head for the bright lights of the big city.
But a young couple come back immediately.
And they come back to the border crossing and say,
"That's great. We just wanted to see if we can do that."
"But we did it now. We need to get home because our baby's home in bed."
And the guards are looking at each other
because these people have been expelled forever.
The guards say, "You can't come back. You've been expelled."
"You can never come back."
And so Harald Jäger comes out to this young couple
who was absolutely losing it.
This is a man who's never disobeyed orders in 25 years.
And he looks at this family. His regime is collapsing.
And he says to them, "Oh, go home to your baby."
That was the beginning of a slippery slope.
And he said, "Finally, about 11:30, I looked at my men and I said,
'Either we start shooting or we're gonna open up.'"
So he gives the order to open up, and people flow through.
And this is the moment at which world history turns,
because then the other frontier crossings start to open up
and hundreds of thousands of people go across.
And it was an absolute surprise.
We got the first message from journalists.
"Something is going on in Berlin."
The signals that the wall is open.
And once people actually are flowing through the Berlin Wall,
then people start going to the Brandenburg Gate,
even though there's no border crossing there,
because it's just the icon of wider Berlin.
This gate standing right in front of the wall.
And it's right in the heart of the city.
Unlike Bornholmer, the people there were not in agreement
with this idea of, "Let's open up."
They are trying to restore control.
I have a request.
We would like to ask you to leave the front part of the Brandenburg Gate.
And you too, behind the barrier, please.
Nothing else will happen today.
How did you come over here?
That's a good question!
Good evening. Live from the Berlin Wall,
on the most historic night in this wall's history.
What you see behind me is a celebration of this new policy
announced today by the East German government.
Now, for the first time since the wall was erected in 1961,
people will be able to move through freely.
And they really don't know what's going on because clearly,
there's reports the wall's open.
There's footage of people going through, there's people getting on the wall.
But the guards are trying to hose them off.
I climbed over the wall
and come and walk, uh, through the Brandenburg Gate.
I jumped over the wall.
- You jumped over the wall? - Yeah!
I'm happy, you know.
I have been dreaming of this for years, and I don't know what to say. I'm happy.
That is the moment
where this greatest symbol of the Cold War is overcome.
It was a kind of miracle.
Oh, it was very deeply emotional.
That was a moment when the East Germans themselves,
leadership considered using violence to clear the square.
We were all holding our breath after the wall had opened.
It was not clear whether that was by design
or by mistake or by misunderstanding.
Would the Soviets send the tanks?
Would shots be fired?
Even though there are hard-liners in the Soviet forces
in East Germany thinking, "Why aren't we doing something?"
That's a decision Gorbachev would have to take. He sleeps through it.
If he had been awakened with that information,
what would have changed?
Gorbachev has said on many occasions that, well, what happened, happened.
Neither that announcement nor what happened afterwards
was done on his orders.
Had Gorbachev been awakened with that information,
he would have said, "Well, stay out of it." That's it.
Now we want to celebrate a bit.
I only have a dim memory of that evening.
We just had a big party. Five days long.
One of the people who crossed that night was Angela Merkel.
Angela Merkel was actually not a major protester or dissident,
but that night, she crossed the wall and she saw possibility.
That was actually the most beautiful moment in my life.
Suddenly there were no longer two worlds.
No East and no West.
Willy Brandt, the man who was mayor when the wall was built,
told the crowd it was the end of a divided Germany.
One has the feeling that after many difficult years,
we may now be close to a point
where that kind of division comes to an end.
Division in Berlin, and not only in Berlin.
I think it was a great day for freedom.
I watched the scenes on television last night and again this morning.
Well, I felt one ought not only to hear about them, but see them,
because you see the joy on people's faces, and you see what freedom means to them.
It makes you realize that you can't stifle or suppress people's desire for liberty.
On that particular day,
we were working on something having to do with refugees
and we were very busy in our meetings.
And I came out and I got a call from General Scowcroft,
the national security advisor's secretary.
And uh, Flo said, "The general wants you to come over and talk to the president
on what just happened in Berlin."
And I said, "What just happened in Berlin?"
And she said, "Turn on the TV! Turn on CNN!"
The Iron Curtain between East Germany...
So we turned on CNN. The wall was coming down!
We all rushed to the Oval Office to tell President Bush,
"You must go to Berlin,
for Kennedy and for Truman and for Reagan."
And he said, "And what would I do? Dance on the wall?"
He said, "This is a German moment, not an American moment."
Did you ever imagine anything like this happening?
Well, we've imagined it,
but, uh, I can't say that I foresaw this development at this state.
No, I didn't foresee it. But imagining it? Yes.
When I talked about a Europe whole and free,
we're talking about this kind of freedom to come and go.
The Berlin Wall didn't just happen overnight.
This was a culmination of a process,
and the process began in the square foot
inside Mikhail Gorbachev's head, to some extent, which is to say,
empire is untenable.
Empire is impossible.
Suddenly, everything looked different.
Politics were different.
People began speaking to one another in a different way.
And the project of the Cold War,
which had been the defense of the West against the East,
suddenly became something different.
It came to be the project of the reunification of Germany.
The project of winding down the military involvement of the US in Europe,
and of changing our relationships with almost everybody in the region.
Bush was very concerned as the wall came down.
Does this provide the pretext
for the Kremlin hard-liners in the KGB, the Army, and the party
to move against Gorbachev?
So that dictated his response.
He did not want to give those guys in the Kremlin
any pretext to move against Gorbachev or to try and send troops.
The Kremlin has reacted to recent events with some consistency,
making clear that political decisions about East Germany
were taken in Berlin and not in Moscow.
Events were moving so fast with such a dizzying pace,
you got up every day wondering what is gonna happen next.
The fall of the wall in November
was actually in the middle of several events that had taken place.
They took to the streets in Baku to defy the Kremlin,
the latest in a dangerous roll call of republics or nationalities
who increasingly believe it is time to break free of communist rule.
Even Bulgaria has begun to crack.
The winds of freedom are blowing, and they're blowing from the West.
People who don't understand that are gonna be gone with the wind.
In Bulgaria, one of the longest-serving leaders
in the Communist Bloc, President Todor Zhivkov,
resigned today after 35 years in power.
He was replaced by Petar Mladenov, known as a relative moderate.
A mass popular movement born from nowhere 12 days ago
is on its way to toppling the communist monopoly in Czechoslovakia.
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright,
and other leaders of the Civic Forum movement,
arrived threatening to bring the country on strike again
if their demands were not met.
Havel, disgraced, his works banned under the old regime,
was able to sit and demand change.
Here, it was the ringing of the keys.
Thousands of Czechoslovaks shaking their house keys,
their way of telling the Communist Party, "The bell tolls for you."
There were reports of more gunfire today in the streets of Romania.
Unconfirmed reports said
that as many as 2,000 people have been killed by government forces
since demonstrations against the hard-line communist regime
began on Saturday.
Ceaușescu is unceremoniously bundled from an armored car,
making his last journey before his execution.
His 70-year-old wife, Elena Ceaușescu, is also seen.
She faced similar charges to her husband, and is said to have met the same fate.
The couple appeared remarkably relaxed,
considering the fact they'd been jointly charged with genocide.
Mikhail Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Soviet president was cited today for his leading role in the peace process,
and the openness he's brought to Soviet Society.
It shows that we're on the right path,
and the changes we are making are right.
It was always interesting to try to understand Gorbachev's long game.
I got to spend some time with him on a couple of occasions,
and it occurred to me that he was a kind of true believer.
He actually believed, if you were to eliminate the lies,
that's what glasnost was about.
Telling the truth about the past.
If you were to eliminate the repression,
and people could feel free again,
if you were to allow people to have a good life,
then they would want to be a part of a reformed Soviet Union.
But after 1989, expectations were raised.
So, people in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they thought,
"Why not go for full independence?"
By the summer of 1991,
there are independence movements all over the Soviet Union,
and Gorbachev is hanging on by a thread.
What he didn't realize was that the Soviet Union was an edifice
that was built on very unstable ground.
He never seemed to understand the degree to which the whole thing was unraveling.
A group of us were tasked to do some scenario planning,
and one was that there might be a coup against Gorbachev.
Would we warn him?
Under what circumstances would we warn him?
Repeating once again our top story,
Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power.
Gorbachev is convinced that he's gonna be killed,
and it seemed unlikely he was gonna get out of this.
An anti-constitutional coup has taken place.
I am under arrest.