Hope. Bloodshed. Perseverance. Change.
These powerful words provide a sketch of the Cold War, which in May 1989, when Hungary began opening the Austria-Hungarian border, entered a decisive phase marked by accelerating change.
Hope was crushed then imprisoned -- that was Eastern Europe's experience in the aftermath of World War II, as Russia's communists forged an iron curtain empire.
Revolts -- violent attempts to shed communist chains -- were smashed. In June 1953, Eastern Germans, demanding free elections, threw stones at Soviet tanks -- and were brutally suppressed. In late 1956, the Hungarians used rifles and anti-tank grenades.
The Hungarians fought alone, receiving no aid from a worried West, and suffered what NATO's secretary-general called "the collective suicide of a whole people." In 1968, the careful Czechs and Slovaks launched Prague Spring, an experiment in non-violent political liberalization with the goal of freedom. Prague Spring died in a cruel August of Soviet armor.
In 1984, the Orwellian year, former Hungarian Gen. Bela Kiraly told me at a Christmas party in Brooklyn, N.Y., that he was "now only an American professor." In 1956, Kiraly had served as military commander in Budapest. When the Red Army attacked the Hungarian revolutionaries, Kiraly's forces tried to resist, but they were completely overmatched militarily.
Kiraly and a remnant group of resistance fighters, pursued by two Soviet tank divisions, retreated toward the Austrian border. With a glass of holiday punch in his hand, he recalled giving his engineer officer orders to blow up an ammunition dump -- an attempt to buy his men more time to flee into Austria. The dump exploded, producing an unexpectedly large cloud. The tank divisions stopped, and Kiraly and his men escaped through the border wire. "I think the Russians thought the U.S. was intervening with nuclear weapons," Kiraly said.
Of course, the United States wasn't. Avoiding all-out war in Europe, particularly nuclear war, was an American Cold War goal. With great perseverance, marred by a handful of dangerous lapses, the United States pursued "containment" of the Soviet Union, in hopes of achieving what George Kennan called (in his 1947 Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct") "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."
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