[Originally published in the Randolph Herald.]
On August 13, 1961, the East German Army and police installed the Berlin wall, or Schandmauer (Wall of Shame). It began in the dead of night with the East Germans stringing barbed wire and concertina along the line that marked the boundary between the Soviet Sector of Berlin and the English, French and American sectors. Before that moment, there had been no physical barrier between the sectors.
The decision to approve the erection the wall was probably made on the spur of the moment , most likely by Nikita Khrushchev. It was clearly made because of the debilitating flow if refugees from East to West Germany. By 1961, roughly 3 .5 million East Germans had left for the West. The total loss to East Germany was measured in the tens of billions of 1961 dollars. The Wall was clearly a snap decision, as no one in the West had any inkling that it was in the offing. It was then and remains today a telling testimony to the horrors of Soviet style communism.
Unfortunately for the East Germans, those who departed were the cream of their crop. They were smart, educated, and competent, consisting mostly of professionals – teachers, engineers, physicians, technicians and skilled workers – anyone capable of making a good life in the West.. They were just the kind of people whom the East German regime could least afford to lose. The issue was often referred to as the” Brain Drain” which, in fact, it most certainly was.
Over the twenty-eight year life of the Wall, some 5,000 East Germans managed to escape, despite its existence. In addition, over 200 were killed in the process of trying to escape.
On Sunday, November 14, 2009, an exhibit opened at Harvard University’s Davis Center which displayed photos and narratives of the Cold War Czechoslovak Secret Service’s (StB) covert photographic surveillance of dissidents in and around Prague. It was an excellent exhibit attended by much of the northeastern Czech/American academic community as well as a diplomat from the Czech Embassy in Washington who gave an excellent presentation on the issue of surveillance of dissidents during Cold War.
These two events, the Czech exhibit at Harvard and the celebration of the demise of the Wall of Shame took place in the rather narrow contexts of the countries in which they had taken place. This is not to say that the Wall was not important to Germans. It was, as it symbolized the rupture of the previously heterogeneous German State, the artificial separation of families and friends and probably underlined the realities and humiliation of the German loss of the Second World War.
At the same time, the Czech surveillance exhibit, at least on the face of it, showed seemingly unaware Czechs as seen through the photographic lenses of their own secret police – their countrymen.
Even though these exhibits and events were effectively presented and celebrated, as were probably all those other commemorations of the downfall of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe, what seemed to be missing from them was an explicit focus on the extraordinary evils that these now fallen regimes represented not only in the countries in which they existed, but in the world at large.
Soviet-style Communism was the quintessential totalitarian regime. It most certainly was an Evil Empire. It was totally disinterested in the welfare of its people. It put up its walls, surveilled its own people and murdered millions of its own citizens purely to maintain itself in power. It committed these horrors because it knew that it had scant support from its people and because it had no reason to believe that would change.
When you think of the extraordinary cynicism such an approach involves, it boggles the mind. The regimes of the USSR and its satellite countries presented themselves to the world, particularly the developing world, as having a system worth emulating, while at the same time knowing they were politically and morally bankrupt at home.
The world now has an entire generation that never experienced the horrors and the incredible cynicism of Soviet communism. Yet there is no communist equivalent of the Holocaust Museum. Even though it all ended with a whimper and not in the glory of a VE day, we in the West should make sure we neither forget, or permit those who follow us not to learn just how evil those folks really were. Otherwise, like skinheads and neo-Nazis, they will sneak back to plague us again.
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff. A longtime resident of Brookfield, he now lives in Williston.
