02-01 The Berlin Wall

Can you imagine being dropped into the centre of a major city and not seeing any movement or hearing any sound? That is the experience my wife and I had, crossing into East Berlin during the 1979 International Symposium on Small Business held in West Berlin.
No cars, very few people walking about, empty stores with empty shelves. It all felt like a city dying or already dead. It was the communist system collapsing, but no one realized it at the time.
Of course, the world remembers the speech by President Reagan in June 1987 in West Berlin when he called out to the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!". The photos of young people attacking the wall were seen all over the world. History was being made.
But to be accurate historically, the first real opposition to the communist system in the Soviet satellites was in Poland. There, a rebellion by shipyard workers in Gdansk, under the leadership of Lech Walesa, led to democratic reforms in 1989, free elections and the fall of the Communist government.
Lech Walesa received the Novel Peace Prize in 1983 and governed Poland during a period of transition from capitalism to communism. It was my honour to meet him personally during an international small business conference in Warsaw in 1992.
Both events in Poland and West Berlin were profound because the Soviet Union was so weak, both politically and economically, that it could not stop the growing rebellion within its ranks.
And how the world remembers when Soviet tanks crushed the rebellion in Hungary back in 1956. And then how Hungary beat Russia at the water polo championship game at the Melbourne Olympics. It was sport and politics and history combined.
And sure enough, going back to 1989, a Communist government was replaced in Czechoslovakia, and the Communist leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed by firing squad.