The building of the Berlin Wall: 50 years on

On 3 August 1961, the leaders of the Communist bloc, the Comecon, met in Moscow. It was the heart of the Cold War. The US Bay of Pigs invasion failed a few months earlier, and in July JFK requested a 25 percent increase in military spending. The East still stood strong but it had a soft underbelly it needed to do something about: Berlin.

Divided by the Potsdam Conference after World War II, succoured by the 1948 blockade and institutionalised by the foundation of the FDR and DDR in 1949, Berlin remained a porous city. Over half a million crossed daily in to West Berlin to get their dose of capitalism. Many East Berliners went shopping or into the cinema and discos in the West, 60,000 commuters even worked there. There was no need for some to defect as they would rather live in the cheaper east as long as the exotic frills of the west such as panty hose and tropical fruit were available just a short U-bahn ride away. Westerners too enjoyed the fruits of the border. West German Deutsch Marks were exchanged into East German DM at a rate of 1:4 and that meant westerners could get goods very cheaply in the East.

But the East was losing most of its thought leaders. The gap in income between the two sides was stark and anyone with ambition wanted to be in the west. Although some were stopped on their way, hundreds of thousands made it across the border forever. By the early 1960s, East Germany had lost 2.5 million trained professionals, 15 percent of its population. The Comecon decided this had to stop before the labour force was completely drained. At 4pm on Saturday 12 August, East German leader Walter Ulbricht issued the order to close the border. At midnight on Sunday, police and armed forces began bolting the city shut. Not only did they build the wall in a day, but they shut streets, the railway and the S-Bahn and U-Bahn. The former pulsating heart of the city at Potzdamer Platz suddenly became a no-go zone.

But it was the wall that captured the imagination and defined the Cold War. It sprung up in the middle of the night. Trucks filled with soldiers and construction workers rumbled though the sleeping city and tore up telephone wires and streets to West Berlin, dug holes to put up concrete posts, and strung barbed wire all across the border. The 100km wall completely wrapped up West Berlin. When everyone woke up in the morning, there was widespread shock. Whichever side of the border you went to bed on 12 August, you were stuck there for decades.

The wall would go through four transformations in its 28-year history. It started as a barbed-wire fence with concrete posts, but after a few days, it was replaced with a permanent structure of concrete blocks, topped with barbed wire. A third version in 1965 was a concrete wall, supported by steel girders. The fourth version built by 1980 had 3.6m high and 1.2m wide concrete slabs with a smooth pipe across the top to stop people from scaling it. By 1989 there was a 91m No-Man's-Land, an additional inner wall, soldiers patrolling with dogs, a raked ground that showed footprints, anti-vehicle trenches, electric fences, massive light systems, watchtowers, bunkers, and minefields.

About 200 people were shot dead trying to cross this labyrinth and another 5,000 escape either over or under the wall. The only people legally allowed to cross the border were foreign tourists, diplomats and military personnel. There were three crossing points. Helmstedt, Dreilinden and a third at Berlin Friedrichstrasse. Based on the phonetic alphabet Helmstedt checkpoint was called Checkpoint Alpha, Dreilinden got Bravo and Friedrichstrasse got the name Charlie. On 25 October 1961, East German border guards at Checkpoint Charlie tried to check the identification as western soldiers entered the Soviet sector. The Americans said the Allied right to move freely had been violated and for 16 hours there was an imminent threat of war. The next day, both sides withdrew after Kennedy and Khrushchev hastily cobbled together an agreement.

While the Revolutions of 1989 were startling in the speed in which they succeeded, the fall of the Wall was the most stunning of all. On the evening of 9 November, East German central committee spokesman Günter Schabowski made a surprise announcement: "Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR (East Germany) into the FRG (West Germany) or West Berlin." "As of when?" asked an Italian journalist. Schabowski hesitated and then improvised: "As far as I know ... as of now."

As locals decoded his bureaucratic announcement, it came as a shock to realise he meant the border was now open. The first East Germans tentatively approached it and found border guards were letting people cross. Within an hour, people from both sides crowded on to the Wall. Some brought hammers and chisels. Others simply hugged, kissed, cheered and cried. Schabowski, who was later imprisoned, said he remembered a Stasi member came to him and said: “Comrade Schabowski, the border is open. Nothing to report.”

Now the Berlin Wall is mostly gone and the few scraps that remain are tourist attractions. The East and West were reunited though the East continues to lag. Some argue Germany is much weaker as a united country with a reunification bill of €1.3 trillion. Yet despite the Trabants that still litter the streets, there are few people calling for the return of the DDR. The Wall the regime built was the supreme monument to the corrosive power of its paranoia and rampant distrust.

Solzhenitsyn

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure overnight, aged 89. The author of over 20 books, Solzhenitsyn was most famous in the West for his portrayal of the Soviet gulag system of which he had first hand experience. But he also won a Nobel Prize for Literature for both the power of his literature and his humanism. His books. translated into hundreds of languages, sold in millions; and his influence on twentieth century discourse is almost unrivalled among writers. Writing in Quadrant in 1998, Peter Coleman described Solzhenitsyn’s impact in the downfall of Soviet Communism as being on a par with Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev. South African writer and fellow Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee was probably more to the point when he described Solzhenitsyn “a man of immense personal courage, and, as a writer, the one indisputable heir of Tolstoy."

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn’s intellectual development followed a very similar path to the 19th century greats Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Living under intrusive and censorious regimes, they wanted to retain the best parts of Russian society as well as take in the best ideas of the West. But, they were eventually driven into some sort of exile and as Max Teichmann wrote in 2005 in National Observer, they became disillusioned and shocked to find that Western democracy was really a plutocracy, its intellectuals careerists and materialists. They eventually re-directed their gaze to Mother Russia to plan a new society that would combine the best of east and west.

This trajectory applies as much to the twentieth century great as his nineteenth century forebears. Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born into an intellectual Cossack family in 1918 in the North Caucasian city of Kislovodsk, which lies between the Black and Caspian Seas. World War I had ended disastrously for Tsarist Russia and the nation was plunged into civil war between white and red. Solzhenitsyn's family was white. But his father died in a hunting accident before he was born. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and was persecuted by the newly installed Soviet regime. She was denied permanent employment and labouring alone, her family was forced into poverty from most of the 1920s and 30s.

Solzhenitsyn harboured literary ambitions early in life, resolving before he was eighteen to write a major novel about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918. He never realised this ambition. After earning degrees in philology, mathematics, and physics at Rostov University, Solzhenitsyn began teaching in 1941, aged 22. That same year Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn enlisted and rose to the rank of artillery captain. He was decorated twice for bravery. But it all counted for nothing when he was arrested for criticising Stalin. While serving on the German front in 1945, Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to a friend, in which he described the Soviet leader as “the man with the moustache”. Such apparently innocuous disrespect could not be tolerated and he was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp in Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.

After he emerged from prison he was determined to fulfil his longstanding ambition to write a novel. He published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, roughly based on his own experiences. The novella describes the daily routine from dawn to lights out at a “special” prison camp in Siberia. The protagonist is Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a former carpenter, who has been in several of these camps for eight years, serving a ten-year term for “treason.” It was published in the literary magazine Novy Mir whose editor A.T. Tvardoovsky advised him to lie low awhile after publication. Despite the author's absence, the response was electric and Denisovich caused a sensation in the USSR and the West.

Solzhenitsyn had taken advantage of the relative freedoms allowed in the Khrushchev era to publish his first book. But in 1964, Brezhnev came to power and the censorship returned. The KGB seized his papers and Solzhenitsyn was forced to go underground. Through the samizdat literature network, he managed to publish another gulag tale “The First Circle” in 1968. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. The Nobel foundation said the award was given for “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. Solzhenitsyn was unable to claim the award in person for fear of being deported.

His fears were warranted. Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of first part of The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental history of the Soviet police state. After moving to West Germany and Switzerland, he settled in the US, where he would live for the next 17 years. In his 1978 Harvard Lecture he delivered a savage denunciation not of Communism but of modernity and “man’s flight from spirituality”. Instead of blasting Russia, Solzhenitsyn saw a loss of courage in the West induced by materialism. A disappointed US media decried his “cranky Puritanism” as the reason he refused to outrightly condemn Communism.

But condemn it or not, Solzhenitsyn outlasted the Soviet Union and returned to his native Russia in 1994.In a 2003 interview for the Catholic St Austin review Solzhenitsyn acknowledged the spiritual dimension was more important in his writings than the political dimension. In April this year Solzhenitsyn was still active in the political dimension; writing a short op-ed for Izvestia. In it he claimed that the 1932-33 Ukraine famine (known by the Russian phrase “holodomor” which means “murder by hunger”) was not a genocide. He said the famine was caused by corrupt Communist officials but was not a deliberate assault by Russia against the people of Ukraine. But years of his own declining health finally took its toll yesterday.

His rehabilitation was complete when, in a rare moment of humility, Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a pilgrimage to the "conscience of Russia" in 2000. Solzhenitsyn's quotes were legion, but I will finish this article with two. In the Gulag Archipelago, he has one of his characters say “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart”. The second quote is when he was asked how he would like to be remembered to posterity. Solzhenitsyn responded first by saying it was a complex question. But he gave a simple answer: “I would hope that all that has been said about me, slandered about me, in the course of decades, would, like mud, dry up and fall off,” he said “It is amazing how much gibberish has been talked about me, more so in the west than in the USSR.”

Chernobyl's new ring of steel

Ukrainian authorities have approved a new $1.4 billion steel cover for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site. Ukraine has hired a French company to build the casing over the crumbling concrete sarcophagus that was put over the reactor in the wake of the 1986 explosion. The original casing was a hastily built interim measure designed to last 20 to 30 years. The new cover will take five years to complete after which authorities will then be able to dismantle the reactor inside the casing.

The 105 m high cover is urgently required to replace the old casing which has been leaking radiation for more than decade. The reactor still contains 95 per cent of the original nuclear fuel from the plant. Ukraine is concerned that if the sarcophagus collapses another cloud of lethal radioactive dust could escape. A French construction firm, Novarka, will build the structure and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has provided the bulk of the funding for the project.

Prior to the explosion Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian) was an obscure city on the Pripyat River in north-central Ukraine. 25kms upstream of the city lay the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant. On 26 April 1986 the city’s name became known across the world. At 1.21am that morning, inexperienced plant nightshift workers turned off the safety switches while doing a test prior to a routine shutdown. A dramatic power surge caused the fuel elements to rupture. The resultant explosion lifted the cover from the No. 4 reactor. Several explosions followed which released thirty to forty times the radioactivity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The graphite in the reactor blazed for ten days. Helicopters dropped 5000 tonnes of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead onto the burning core to extinguish the fire and limit the release of radioactive particles. Most of the released material was deposited close by as dust and debris, but the lighter material was carried by wind over the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and to a lesser degree over Scandinavia and Western Europe.

While Soviet authorities sent in several hundred thousand “liquidators” (most of who received near lethal doses of radiation) to attend to the fire, they released no news to the outside world. The first evidence emerged on 28 April, two days after the explosion. Workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden were found to have radioactive particles on their clothes. Forsmark is approximately 1,100 km from Chernobyl. Sweden’s investigation into the source of the radioactivity showed it was coming from the East. Although the Soviets initially denied anything had happened, finally the official Tass news agency reported briefly that an accident occurred at Chernobyl with “some casualties”.

On 2 May, authorities evacuated everyone within 10km of the plant, including the plant workers village of Pripyat. Two days later, all those living within a 30 kilometre radius including the city of Chernobyl itself - a further 116 000 people from the more contaminated area - were evacuated and later relocated. About 1,000 of these have since returned unofficially to live within the contaminated zone.

Four months after the disaster, the Russians finally came clean at an IAEA conference in Vienna. The Soviet Union's chief delegate Valery Legasov stunned his audience with a detailed and frank expose of what went wrong. British government representative Professor John Gittus (document link) received a thick package of carefully prepared documents containing details such as copies of chart recorders at Chernobyl's stricken reactor at the time of the blast. "For me this was the beginning of perestroika," he said. "We didn't realize that at the time, of course, but Chernobyl was a turning point -- a punctuation mark in Russian history."

However information was slow in getting to those nearest the disaster site. It wasn’t until 1989, that the local public gradually became more aware of the extent of the catastrophe. The number of newspaper articles about Chernobyl tripled and pressure on the Soviet leadership grew to co-ordinate a second wave of resettlement began. In 1991, the third phase of Chernobyl policy was determined by the successor states of the Soviet Union in the contaminated area: Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Official Chernobyl committees were set up in Belarus and Ukraine to compensate and resettlement victims.

There is no consensus over the death toll. After the initial explosion 28 people died, mostly fire-fighters, from radiation or thermal burns, another 60 or so died in the years that followed. A 2005 UN health agency report estimated that about 9,300 people will die from cancers caused by Chernobyl's radiation. Some groups, such as Greenpeace, say the toll has been grossly underestimated. Their report, based on Belarus national cancer statistics, predicts 270,000 cancers and 93,000 fatal cancer cases directly attributable to the nuclear explosion. Radiation has had a devastating effect on survivors; damaging immune and endocrine systems, leading to accelerated ageing, cardiovascular and blood illnesses. With the temporary sarcophagus likely to leak for its remaining five years of existence, the total death toll could reach over 200,000.