Some closing considerations about 1989
When I hear that sentence "I never dreamed...", I have a twofold reaction. On the one hand, I cannot say that I expected the collapse of the Communist East. On the other, it did not surprise me. Delight me, yes; fill me with joy and hope, indeed. Surprise me? Absolutely not.
And that for two reasons. First, we had spent the eighties watching one tyranny after another going down under the push of "people power" - and ultimately, though we did not know it then, of the disapproval of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II; when Pope and Emperor agree, what chance do the little kings have? Democracy had taken over in the Philipines, in South Korea, in Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Thailand, and a dozen lesser states. So, when we saw enormous, disciplined, peaceful crowds take to the streets of Warsaw, of Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, and finally - during the attempted coup of 1991 - in Moscow itself, this repeated a pattern that had prevailed across the world throughout the decade. In Italy we had the added sense of triumph of having broken the Red Brigades - that had seemed so powerful only a few years before - and began to seriously crack the horrible cancer of organized crime. But the whole process of people power and liberation had begun in Poland, in 1980 (and well might dear old Lech Walesa be the one who knocked over the first symbolic domino in yesterday's celebration!). There had been a false start in Tehran, where a possible democratic revolution had been penetrated and hijacked by a far-sighted tyrant. (Oriana Fallaci, who had met pretty much every powerful politician in her time, and who hated Khomeini and everything he stood for, nonetheless assessed him as one of the few political leaders she had met who did not disappoint.) But the great Polish strikes of 1980 set the tone for the whole decade; and it was a tone of liberation across the board, left and right.
The second reason is that I had long felt that Russia and her bloc were on a losing path. One thing about being pushed up hard against the very edge of Soviet power; one could not easily be misled about its real nature. And long before 1980, every European, with the partial exception of a few members of an older generation to whom Stalingrad still loomed large enough to blind them, was very clear about the backwardness, the poverty and the squalor of Communist tyranny. One could hardly miss it. People did from time to time visit, and the obsessional control of tourists could not prevent them from forming their own impressions. Defections were continuous; in the seventies, the coastal town of Ladispoli, near Rome, was famous for its transient Russian colony - hundreds if not thousands of Russian escapees, at any time, waiting for their American or Israeli visas. Central European refugees seemed more willing to stop, and it was very easy for anyone to meet East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and so on. My half-sister (whom I rarely mention, because I only met her a couple of times in my life) is the daughter of a Czech dancer, a close friend of my mother is from East Germany, and even Italy's most famous porn star, "Cicciolina", is actually a Hungarian refugee called Ilona Stailer. And in London I studied comparative religion with a Russian who had escaped the KGB, and Buddhism with a Pole.
In the face of this constant background noise of escape and rejection, there was no way that a starry-eyed notion of the Eastern bloc could long survive, even had the horrors of Hungary in '56 and Czechoslovakia in '68 not happened. And it so happened that both invasions were closely witnessed and remarkably well described by some of the most outstanding Italian journalists of the day; Indro Montanelli's 1956 account of the Hungarian revolt is considered a classic of the Italian language.
Last but not least, there was contact with the products of the regimes. A trickle of imports tended to reach the West, and leave an unforgettable impression of Soviet engineering. I still keep, as a historical document, a Soviet-made radio from the early seventies; clearly imitated in design from contemporary Scandinavian objects, spare and angular, but twice as heavy as a similar Western machine would have been, and with a stiff handle built into the body instead of swivelling on a joint. The cars became legendary - people of my generation have a store of Lada, Yugo and Skoda jokes, out of date now, but testifying to the impression these engineering wonders (we had not yet seen Trabants!) left on minds used to Western standards. The Russian-made Ladas, in particular, were to me almost a vision of judgment: I well remember, long before 1989, remarking to my father what an effect it had to see the Great Revolution, that was supposed to change mankind, having to import used-up lines of production for outdated Fiat models - and Fiat was not, at the time, regarded as the best of Western car makers - just to be able to make their own. Every Italian could tell a Lada a mile off: it was the one that looked like a Fiat he or she had driven ten years earlier.
The importance of Ronald Reagan in this is not, in my view, in his wild overspending on military programs. That was a gambler's approach to international politics - I'll see your SS20 missiles and raise you ten aircraft carriers - that did nothing much for the USA at a time when they were beginning to deindustrialize, and could well have failed to shake a Soviet Union in a different mood. The Soviets, after all, had practically taken out the patent on arms races. Nor was it his famous (in America) call to tear down the Wall. If the Wall came down, it was not thanks to this particular trumpet, any more than it had fallen down when JF Kennedy had challenged its legitimacy in equally memorable words. It fell down because the Soviet Union was tired. Two generations of Soviet leaders had been dominated by the urge to spread the revolution around the world, and used Russia purely as a base to spread their gospel - or their subversion. In their hands, the very meaning of foreign policy and foreign intelligence had changed: colossal state bodies employing hundreds of thousands of trained men and women had been dedicated to influencing, and so far as possible directing, every aspect of civil, cultural and economic life in every country in the world. But the new generation was concerned with Russia, its running and its resources, its tired people and mismanaged economy, and saw the external apparatus as a drain on Russian resources. The wall came down, essentially, because Gorbachev told the East Germans that he was not disposed to spend Soviet treasure and Soviet lives in keeping down a country whose people no longer wanted Communism; and he was able to say so, indeed to take a policy whose long-term result was exactly this, because he had plenty of people behind him who thought exactly as he did. The draw of internationalism and world refolution had ceased to exist, and while the Soviet system still overhangs and harms the new Russia in many ways, both Putin and Eltsin before him have in common that they are Russian nationalists before all, and that every act they take - especially Putin - is based on the consideration, what good will this do Russia? Looking for revolutionaries in distant countries to support with Russian money and resources is no longer of any interest to them.
No: the importance of Reagan in this process was quite different. It was in the way in which he consistently applied a strategy of preference for democratic governments and popular movements. Street insurrections that would, in the days of Johnson and Nixon, have been torn to pieces by tanks, saw the tyrants of such American satellites as the Philipines and South Korea resigning and even fleeing into exile. In other places, the process was smoother; but the thing is that by the time the Soviets even began their own process of reform, America had already largely dropped its cold war baggage of corrupt and torturing dictators. It was thanks to this policy choice, which was a conscious decision by Reagan himself - he was actually surrounded by people who had helped the Marcoses and the Pinochets and remained unrepentant - that the whole concept of people power, and of democracy as the default form of government of a civilized country, had started to dominate the landscape.
And that for two reasons. First, we had spent the eighties watching one tyranny after another going down under the push of "people power" - and ultimately, though we did not know it then, of the disapproval of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II; when Pope and Emperor agree, what chance do the little kings have? Democracy had taken over in the Philipines, in South Korea, in Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Thailand, and a dozen lesser states. So, when we saw enormous, disciplined, peaceful crowds take to the streets of Warsaw, of Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, and finally - during the attempted coup of 1991 - in Moscow itself, this repeated a pattern that had prevailed across the world throughout the decade. In Italy we had the added sense of triumph of having broken the Red Brigades - that had seemed so powerful only a few years before - and began to seriously crack the horrible cancer of organized crime. But the whole process of people power and liberation had begun in Poland, in 1980 (and well might dear old Lech Walesa be the one who knocked over the first symbolic domino in yesterday's celebration!). There had been a false start in Tehran, where a possible democratic revolution had been penetrated and hijacked by a far-sighted tyrant. (Oriana Fallaci, who had met pretty much every powerful politician in her time, and who hated Khomeini and everything he stood for, nonetheless assessed him as one of the few political leaders she had met who did not disappoint.) But the great Polish strikes of 1980 set the tone for the whole decade; and it was a tone of liberation across the board, left and right.
The second reason is that I had long felt that Russia and her bloc were on a losing path. One thing about being pushed up hard against the very edge of Soviet power; one could not easily be misled about its real nature. And long before 1980, every European, with the partial exception of a few members of an older generation to whom Stalingrad still loomed large enough to blind them, was very clear about the backwardness, the poverty and the squalor of Communist tyranny. One could hardly miss it. People did from time to time visit, and the obsessional control of tourists could not prevent them from forming their own impressions. Defections were continuous; in the seventies, the coastal town of Ladispoli, near Rome, was famous for its transient Russian colony - hundreds if not thousands of Russian escapees, at any time, waiting for their American or Israeli visas. Central European refugees seemed more willing to stop, and it was very easy for anyone to meet East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and so on. My half-sister (whom I rarely mention, because I only met her a couple of times in my life) is the daughter of a Czech dancer, a close friend of my mother is from East Germany, and even Italy's most famous porn star, "Cicciolina", is actually a Hungarian refugee called Ilona Stailer. And in London I studied comparative religion with a Russian who had escaped the KGB, and Buddhism with a Pole.
In the face of this constant background noise of escape and rejection, there was no way that a starry-eyed notion of the Eastern bloc could long survive, even had the horrors of Hungary in '56 and Czechoslovakia in '68 not happened. And it so happened that both invasions were closely witnessed and remarkably well described by some of the most outstanding Italian journalists of the day; Indro Montanelli's 1956 account of the Hungarian revolt is considered a classic of the Italian language.
Last but not least, there was contact with the products of the regimes. A trickle of imports tended to reach the West, and leave an unforgettable impression of Soviet engineering. I still keep, as a historical document, a Soviet-made radio from the early seventies; clearly imitated in design from contemporary Scandinavian objects, spare and angular, but twice as heavy as a similar Western machine would have been, and with a stiff handle built into the body instead of swivelling on a joint. The cars became legendary - people of my generation have a store of Lada, Yugo and Skoda jokes, out of date now, but testifying to the impression these engineering wonders (we had not yet seen Trabants!) left on minds used to Western standards. The Russian-made Ladas, in particular, were to me almost a vision of judgment: I well remember, long before 1989, remarking to my father what an effect it had to see the Great Revolution, that was supposed to change mankind, having to import used-up lines of production for outdated Fiat models - and Fiat was not, at the time, regarded as the best of Western car makers - just to be able to make their own. Every Italian could tell a Lada a mile off: it was the one that looked like a Fiat he or she had driven ten years earlier.
The importance of Ronald Reagan in this is not, in my view, in his wild overspending on military programs. That was a gambler's approach to international politics - I'll see your SS20 missiles and raise you ten aircraft carriers - that did nothing much for the USA at a time when they were beginning to deindustrialize, and could well have failed to shake a Soviet Union in a different mood. The Soviets, after all, had practically taken out the patent on arms races. Nor was it his famous (in America) call to tear down the Wall. If the Wall came down, it was not thanks to this particular trumpet, any more than it had fallen down when JF Kennedy had challenged its legitimacy in equally memorable words. It fell down because the Soviet Union was tired. Two generations of Soviet leaders had been dominated by the urge to spread the revolution around the world, and used Russia purely as a base to spread their gospel - or their subversion. In their hands, the very meaning of foreign policy and foreign intelligence had changed: colossal state bodies employing hundreds of thousands of trained men and women had been dedicated to influencing, and so far as possible directing, every aspect of civil, cultural and economic life in every country in the world. But the new generation was concerned with Russia, its running and its resources, its tired people and mismanaged economy, and saw the external apparatus as a drain on Russian resources. The wall came down, essentially, because Gorbachev told the East Germans that he was not disposed to spend Soviet treasure and Soviet lives in keeping down a country whose people no longer wanted Communism; and he was able to say so, indeed to take a policy whose long-term result was exactly this, because he had plenty of people behind him who thought exactly as he did. The draw of internationalism and world refolution had ceased to exist, and while the Soviet system still overhangs and harms the new Russia in many ways, both Putin and Eltsin before him have in common that they are Russian nationalists before all, and that every act they take - especially Putin - is based on the consideration, what good will this do Russia? Looking for revolutionaries in distant countries to support with Russian money and resources is no longer of any interest to them.
No: the importance of Reagan in this process was quite different. It was in the way in which he consistently applied a strategy of preference for democratic governments and popular movements. Street insurrections that would, in the days of Johnson and Nixon, have been torn to pieces by tanks, saw the tyrants of such American satellites as the Philipines and South Korea resigning and even fleeing into exile. In other places, the process was smoother; but the thing is that by the time the Soviets even began their own process of reform, America had already largely dropped its cold war baggage of corrupt and torturing dictators. It was thanks to this policy choice, which was a conscious decision by Reagan himself - he was actually surrounded by people who had helped the Marcoses and the Pinochets and remained unrepentant - that the whole concept of people power, and of democracy as the default form of government of a civilized country, had started to dominate the landscape.