gorbachev speech

The Cold War Didn’t Have to End. Gorbachev Made It Happen

I f there was one belief shared in 1985 by Western politicians, the leaders and peoples of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet political elite, it was that maintenance of Soviet-type Communist systems in the Warsaw Pact countries was for Moscow non-negotiable. However much Washington politicians talked, especially in the 1950s about rollback of Communism, Communist systems carried on. Western leaders condemned the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but no American president contemplated a military response. As Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev , who died on August 30 at 91, later agreed, nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought.

What changed? The decommunization of Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War was not a consequence of Reagan’s military build-up and his starry-eyed Strategic Defense Initiative. Even Robert Gates joked that “there appeared to be only two people on the planet who actually thought SDI would work—Reagan and Gorbachev”. Gorbachev’s concern was not because he believed this would work in the manner Reagan hoped, but because to nullify a missile defense system meant overwhelming it with the sheer number of incoming missiles, some with nuclear warheads and some without. In other words, an acceleration of the arms race. The Soviet Ministry of Defense were perfectly content with that prospect, but Gorbachev was not.

Reagan’s presidency coincided with the last two years of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet leadership, the whole of the short Kremlin tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, and the first four years of Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Nothing changed fundamentally in Eastern Europe, or for the better in East-West relations, until the last of these four leaders came to power.

In the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. had military superiority over the Soviet Union. Yet, Communism was not only sustained in Eastern Europe, it spread further afield. That makes it all the odder to argue, as some do, that in the mid-1980s when there was a rough military parity between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., a Soviet leadership had no alternative but to seek to end the Cold War.

So long as it remained cold and not hot, this standoff had big advantages for the Soviet party-state bosses. Political isolation made it easier to avoid ideological contamination and to preserve the status quo. Constant warnings of the imperialist threat helped justify strict party control and the vigilance of the KGB against enemies at home or abroad.

Maintaining the military capacity for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) took a larger share of the Soviet economy than a comparable policy did in the larger American economy, but it was a price Soviet leaders were willing to pay, egged on by the most powerful of institutional interests. For Gorbachev to out manoeuvre the military-industrial complex required boldness and political finesse. The way he used the unscheduled and unchallenged flight to the edge of Red Square of a young West German, Matthias Rust, in May 1987 was an example. Gorbachev seized the opportunity to dismiss not only the conservative Minister of Defense but about a hundred other military leaders who were opposed to the concessions he was prepared to make to secure large-scale arms reductions.

Gorbachev made three contributions that were fundamental to ending the Cold War. The first was to remove its ideological foundations. In a break with Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Gorbachev called in 1988 for a “deideologization of interstate relations” and argued for priority to be given to values and interests that united the whole of humanity rather than those of any one class, nation or group. These included “the worldwide ecological threats” which, ahead of most Western leaders, he declared in his 1988 speech at the United Nations to be “simply frightening.”

The second crucial contribution to ending the Cold War was his embrace of fundamental change of the Soviet political system and Soviet society. The new tolerance within the Soviet Union itself—from an end to persecution of religion to a burgeoning freedom of speech and, before long, of publication reduced the sense of Soviet threat. When Gorbachev announced in 1988 that the following year there would be contested elections for a new legislature, this was a decisive step toward making the political system different in kind.

Gorbachev’s third fundamental contribution to ending the Cold War was his recognition that means in politics are as important as ends, and that included his commitment to change by peaceful means. The former head of Soviet Space Research, Roald Sagdeev, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1989, remarked on Gorbachev’s faith in persuasion, and how this, too, differentiated him from previous Soviet political bosses who would just issue an order and expect to have it obeyed.

At the international level, nothing was more important than Gorbachev’s eschewal of the use of force. What had appeared in 1985 too remote for serious consideration—the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe—was calmly accepted by Gorbachev. Not for a moment did he consider the use of force to prevent this. Indeed, he was in the process of dismantling the Communist system in his own country. Responding to later Russian criticism that he had given up the countries of the Soviet bloc without a fight, his response was, “To whom did we surrender them? To their own people.”

Anyone who thinks that Soviet leaders had no option but to accept the end of their hegemony in East-Central Europe and then the interconnected dissolution of the Soviet Union (East European countries gaining their independence raised the expectations of the most disaffected nations within the Soviet Union itself) need look no further than Ukraine in 2022. The brutal war being waged there is a reminder that the militarily stronger Soviet Union did have the option of preserving their statehood by force. It is confirmation that the values of political leaders—a Gorbachev or a Putin—still matter.

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I have been requested by the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, to present his address to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and to all those present today at this award ceremony: To the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Mrs. Gidske Anderson:

Esteemed Mrs. Anderson, I am deeply and personally moved by the decision of the Nobel Committee to award me the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. The prestige and authority of the Nobel Peace Prize are universally recognized. The prize has been awarded ever since the beginning of this century. The disasters and tragedies of this period, which have not managed to subdue man's optimism and unflagging belief in human reason, have given the Peace Prize the unique aura associated with it today. Immanuel Kant prophesied that mankind would one day be faced with a dilemma, either to be joined in a true union of nations or to perish in a war of annihilation ending in the extinction of the human race. Now, as we move from the second to the third millennium, the clock has struck the moment of truth. In this respect, the year 1990 represents a turning point. It marks the end of the unnatural division of Europe. Germany has been reunited. We have begun resolutely to tear down the material foundations of a military, political and ideological confrontation. But there are some very grave threats that have not been eliminated: the potential for conflict and the primitive instincts which allow it, aggressive intentions, and totalitarian traditions. I would like to assure you that the leadership of the USSR is doing and will continue to do everything in its power to ensure that future developments in Europe and the world as a whole are based on openness, mutual trust, international law and universal values. The recent meeting in Paris of heads of state and government from the European nations, the United States and Canada, embodying all the best elements in international movements such as the Helsinki Process, has established the framework for a Europe based on the rule of law, stability, good relations between neighboring countries and humane attitudes. It is my hope that such a Europe will be understood and accepted by nations and governments in other parts of the world as an example of universal security and genuine cooperation. I do not regard the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize as an award to me personally, but as a recognition of what we call perestroika and innovative political thinking, which is of vital significance for human destinies all over the world. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1990 confirms that perestroika and innovative political thinking no longer belong only to us, the people of the Soviet Union. They are the property of the whole of mankind and are an inseparable part of its destiny and of a safe, peaceful future.

We are deeply grateful to Norway and other members of the international community who have shown such understanding and who, through their conduct in international issues and in their relations with the Soviet Union, have shown their solidarity as we proceed with our perestroika and their sympathy as we struggle to resolve our problems. If we all took this as our point of departure, mankind would have no cause to regret the loss of a unique opportunity for reason and the logic of peace to prevail over that of war and alienation. Once more, I would like to express my appreciation for this very great honor. I intend to do everything in my power to live up to the expectations and hopes of my countrymen and all those who support the Nobel Committee's choice. With my sincere wishes for peace and prosperity, Mikhail Gorbachev President of the USSR This was the address by the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1990, which I, as his personal representative, have had the honor of making on his behalf. Thank you for your attention.  

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The Gorbachev Visit; Excerpts From Speech to U.N. on Major Soviet Military Cuts

• Dec. 8, 1988

Following are excerpts from the speech by the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to the General Assembly today, as issued in translation by the Soviet Mission: The Limits of Power

We have come here to show our respect for the United Nations, which increasingly has been manifesting its ability to act as a unique international center in the service of peace and security.

The world in which we live today is radically different from what it was at the beginning or even in the middle of this century. And it continues to change as do all its components.

The advent of nuclear weapons was just another tragic reminder of the fundamental nature of that change. A material symbol and expression of absolute military power, nuclear weapons at the same time revealed the absolute limits of that power.

The problem of mankind's survival and self-preservation came to the fore.

It is obvious, for instance, that the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy. This applies above all to nuclear arms, but that is not the only thing that matters. All of us, and primarily the stronger of us, must exercise self-restraint and totally rule out any outward-oriented use of force.

That is the first and the most important component of a nonviolent world as an ideal which we proclaimed together with India in the Delhi Declaration and which we invite you to follow.

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• Mikhail Gorbachev - Acceptance Speech

Mikhail Gorbachev

Acceptance speech, english russian.

As the Laureate was unable to be present on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1990, the acceptance was read by Mr Andrej Kovaljov, First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union.

(Translation)

Your Majesty, Esteemed Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ladies and gentlemen,

I have been requested by the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, to present his address to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and to all those present today at this award ceremony:

To the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Mrs. Gidske Anderson: Esteemed Mrs. Anderson,

I am deeply and personally moved by the decision of the Nobel Committee to award me the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize.

The prestige and authority of the Nobel Peace Prize are universally recognised. The prize has been awarded ever since the beginning of this century. The disasters and tragedies of this period, which have not managed to subdue man’s optimism and unflagging belief in human reason, have given the Peace Prize the unique aura associated with it today.

Immanuel Kant prophesied that mankind would one day be faced with a dilemma: either to be joined in a true union of nations or to perish in a war of annihilation ending in the extinction of the human race.’ Now, as we move from the second to the third millennium, the clock has struck the moment of truth.

In this respect, the year 1990 represents a turning point. It marks the end of the unnatural division of Europe. Germany has been reunited. We have begun resolutely to tear down the material foundations of a military, political and ideological confrontation. But there are some very grave threats that have not been eliminated: the potential for conflict and the primitive instincts which allow it, aggressive intentions, and totalitarian traditions.

I would like to assure you that the leadership of the USSR is doing and will continue to do everything in its power to ensure that future developments in Europe and the world as a whole are based on openness, mutual trust, international law and universal values.

The recent meeting in Paris of heads of state and government from the European nations, the United States and Canada, embodying all the best elements in international movements such as the Helsinki Process, has established the framework for a Europe based on the rule of law, stability, good relations between neighbouring countries and humane attitudes.’ It is my hope that such a Europe will be understood and accepted by nations and governments in other parts of the world as an example of universal security and genuine cooperation.

I do not regard the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize as an award to me personally, but as a recognition of what we call perestroika and innovative political thinking, which is of vital significance for human destinies all over the world.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 1990 confirms that perestroika and innovative political thinking no longer belong only to us, the people of the Soviet Union. They are the property of the whole of mankind and are an inseparable part of its destiny and of a safe, peaceful future. We are deeply grateful to Norway and other members of the international community who have shown such understanding and who, through their conduct in international issues and in their relations with the Soviet Union, have shown their solidarity as we proceed with our perestroika and their sympathy as we struggle to resolve our problems. If we all took this as our point of departure, mankind would have no cause to regret the loss of a unique opportunity for reason and the logic of peace to prevail over that of war and alienation.

Once more, I would like to express my appreciation for this very great honour. I intend to do everything in my power to live up to the expectations and hopes of my countrymen and all those who support the Nobel Committee’s choice.

With my sincere wishes for peace and prosperity,

Mikhail Gorbachev President of the USSR

This was the address by the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1990, which I, as his personal representative, have had the honour of making on his behalf.

Thank you for your attention.

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The Cold War

Gorbachev’s maiden speech hints at reform (1985).

In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In his maiden speech, Gorbachev paid tribute to his predecessor, Konstatin Chernenko, and maintained his commitment to Soviet communism. But his speech also hinted at forthcoming economic reforms and hope of a nuclear arms reduction agreement with the United States:

“All of us, all our party and country are if deep grief. Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, a true Leninist, an outstanding figure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state, of the international Communist movement, a person with a responsive heart and of a big organizational talent, has passed away… Chernenko devoted all his efforts and knowledge to developing the economy of the country, raising the well-being and cultural level of the people, ensuring the security of the motherland, preserving and consolidating peace on Earth… The strategic line worked out at the 26th Congress, at the subsequent Plenary meetings of the Central Committee with vigorous participation of Andropov and Chernenko, has been and remains unchanged. This is the line towards speeding up the country’s social and economic development, toward perfecting all aspects of the life of society. The point at issue is restructuring the material and technical base of production. The point at issue is the perfection of the system of social relations, above all economic ones. The point at issue is also the development of the individual, qualitative improvement of the material conditions of his life and work, of his spiritual makeup. We are to achieve a decisive turn in transferring the national economy to the tracks of intensive development. We are bound to attain within the briefest period the most advanced scientific and technical positions, the highest world level in the productivity of social labour. In the foreign policy sphere, our course is clear and consistent. This is the course of peace and progress. The first precept of the Party and the state is to preserve and strengthen in every way the fraternal friendship with our closest friends and allies: the countries of the great socialist community. We will do everything that depends on us to expand cooperation with socialist states to enhance the role and influence of socialism in world affairs. We would like a serious improvement of relations with the People’s Republic of China and believe that, given reciprocity, this is quite possible. The Soviet Union has always supported the struggle of peoples for liberation from colonial oppression. And today our sympathies go out to the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which are following the road of consolidating independence and social renovation. For us, they are friends and partners in the struggle for a durable peace, for better and just relations between peoples. As to relations with capitalist states, I would like to say the following. We will firmly follow the Leninist course of peace and peaceful coexistence. To goodwill, the Soviet Union will always respond with goodwill, as it will respond with trust to trust. But everyone should know that we shall never waive the interests of our motherland and those of its allies. We value the successes of the relaxation of international tensions achieved in the 1970s and are ready to take part in carrying on with the process of establishing mutually beneficial cooperation between states, on the basis of principles of equality, mutual respect and non-intervention in the internal affairs… Never before has so terrible a threat loomed so large and dark over mankind as these days. The only reasonable way out of the existing situation is an agreement of the confronting forces on an immediate termination of the race in arms, above all, nuclear arms, on Earth and its prevention in space. An agreement on an honest and equitable basis, without attempts at outplaying the other side and dictating terms to it. An agreement which would help all to advance toward the cherished goal: the complete elimination and prohibition of nuclear weapons for good, toward the complete removal of the threat of nuclear war. This is our firm conviction… Comrades, these days we feel still more keenly how mighty and monolithic the ranks of the Communists are and how united our Soviet people are. At the recent elections, Soviet people again expressed unanimous support for the course of our party and the state. This support is both inspiring and binding. Today, the plenary meeting of the Central Committee placed upon me the complex and great duties of General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. I am well aware of the great trust put in me and of the great responsibility connected with this. In the forthcoming work, I count on the support and active assistance of the members of the Politburo and secretaries of the Central Committee, and the Party’s Central Committee as a whole. Your versatile experience is the gist of the historical experience of our people. I promise you, comrades, to do my utmost to faithfully serve our party, our people, and the great Leninist cause.”

Gorbachev Resigns as President

Mikhail gorbachev, resignation. december 25, 1991.

Original Source: Broadcast on Central Television, December 25, 1991; printed in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 26 December 1991.

Dear compatriots! Fellow citizens! Due to the situation that has taken shape as a result of the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ceasing my activity in the post of President of the USSR. I am making this decision out of considerations of principle.

I have firmly advocated the independence of peoples and the sovereignty of republics. But at the same time I have favored the preservation of the Union state and the integrity of the country.

Events have taken a different path. A policy line aimed at dismembering the country and disuniting the state has prevailed, something that I cannot agree with …

Speaking to you for the last time as President of the USSR, I consider it necessary to express my assessment of the path traversed since 1986. Especially since there are a good many contradictory, superficial and unobjective opinions on this score.

Fate ordained that when I became head of state it was already clear that things were not going well in the country. We have a great deal of everything — land, petroleum, gas and other natural resources — and God has endowed us with intelligence and talent, too, but we live much worse than people in the developed countries do, and we are lagging further and further behind them.

The reason was evident-society was suffocating in the grip of the command-bureaucratic system. Doomed to serve ideology and to bear the terrible burden of the arms race, it had been pushed to the limit of what was possible.

All attempts at partial reforms — and there were a good many of them — failed, one after the other. The country had lost direction. It was impossible to go on living that way. Everything had to be changed fundamentally.

That is why I have never once regretted that I did not take advantage of the position of General Secretary just to “reign” for a few years. I would have considered that irresponsible and immoral.

I realized that to begin reforms on such a scale and in such a society as ours was an extremely difficult and even risky endeavor. But even today I am convinced of the historical correctness of the democratic reforms that were begun in the spring of 1986 …

The totalitarian system, which for a long time deprived the country of the opportunity to become prosperous and flourishing, has been eliminated.

-A breakthrough has been achieved in the area of democratic transformations. Free elections, freedom of the press, religious freedoms, representative bodies of power and a multiparty system have become a reality. Human rights have been recognized as the highest principle.

-Movement toward a mixed economy has begun, and the equality of all forms of ownership is being established. Within the framework of a land reform, the peasantry has begun to revive, private farming has appeared, and millions of hectares of land are being given to rural and urban people. The economic freedom of the producer has been legalized, and entrepreneurship, the formation of joint-stock companies and privatization have begun to gather momentum.

–In turning the economy toward a market, it is important to remember that this is being done for the sake of human beings. In this difficult time, everything possible must be done for their social protection, and this applies especially to old people and children.

We are living in a new world:

–An end has been put to the Cold War, and the arms race and the insane militarization of the country, which disfigured our economy and the public consciousness and morals, have been halted. The threat of a world war has been removed …

All these changes required enormous effort and took place in an acute struggle, with mounting resistance from old, obsolete and reactionary forces-both the former Party-state structures and the economic apparatus-and also from our habits, ideological prejudices, and a leveling and parasitic mentality. The changes ran up against our intolerance, low level of political sophistication, and fear of change.

For this reason, we lost a great deal of time. The old system collapsed before a new one had time to start working. And the crisis in society became even more exacerbated …

The August putsch brought the general crisis to the breaking point. The most disastrous aspect of this crisis was the disintegration of the state system. Today I am alarmed by our people’s losing their citizenship in a great country-the consequences may prove to be very grave for everyone …

I am leaving my post with a feeling of anxiety. But also with hope and with faith in you, in your wisdom and strength of spirit. We are the heirs to a great civilization, and its rebirth into a new, up-to-date and fitting life now depends on each and every one of us.

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart those who during these years stood with me for a right and good cause. Certainly some mistakes could have been avoided, and many things could have been done better. But I am sure that sooner or later our common efforts will bear fruit and our peoples will live in a prosperous and democratic society.

I wish all of you the very best.

Source: Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XLIII, No. 52 (January 29, 1992), pp. 1, 3.

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Gorbachev’s resignation 30 years ago marked the end of USSR

FILE - Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, signs the decree relinquishing control of nuclear weapons to Boris Yeltsin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Wednesday, Dec. 25, 1991. Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation on Dec. 25, 1991, drawing a line under more than 74 years of Soviet history. By the fall of 1991, however, deepening economic woes and secessionist bids by Soviet republics had made the collapse of the USSR all but inevitable. The failed August 1991 hardliner coup was a major catalyst, dramatically eroding Gorbachev’s authority and encouraging more republics to seek independence. (AP Photo/Liu Heung Shing, File)

FILE - The Soviet flag flies over the Kremlin at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, Saturday night, Dec. 21, 1991. After Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25, 1991, people strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor. (AP Photo/Gene Berman, File)

FILE - President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, left, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev enter the podium at the start of the closing session of the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow, Russia on Sept. 5, 1991. While Gorbachev was taking desperate efforts to negotiate a new “union treaty” between Soviet republics to preserve the USSR in the fall of 1991, he faced stiff resistance from his arch-rival, Russian Federation’s head Boris Yeltsin, and other independent-minded leaders of Soviet republics. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, second right, Ukraine’s President Leonid Kravchuk, second left, Belarus’ leader Stanislav Shushkevich, third left, Russia’s State Secretary Gennady Burbulis, right, Belarus’ Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich, third right, and Ukraine’s Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, left, sign an agreement terminating the Soviet Union and declaring the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Viskuli, Belarus on Dec. 8, 1991. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the USSR dead and announced the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, an alliance joined two weeks later by eight other Soviet republics. (AP Photo/Yuri Ivanov, File)

FILE - Soviet citizens watch honors guard soldiers during the changing of the guard at Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow, Russia, on Dec. 11, 1991. On Dec. 8, 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the USSR dead and announced the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, an alliance joined two weeks later by eight other Soviet republics. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - The flag of the Soviet Union, left, and the flag of the Russian Republic fly side by side over the Kremlin in Moscow, on Saturday, Dec. 21, 1991. After Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25, 1991, people strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - The Soviet red flag towers above the Kremlin as political power shifts to reveal a new system in Moscow, on Wednesday, Dec. 18, 1991. After Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25, 1991, people strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25, were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor. (AP Photo/Boris Yurchenko, File)

FILE - Several women wait with their tickets in hand, for fresh bread at a bakery in Moscow, Monday, Dec. 23, 1991. By the fall of 1991, however, deepening economic woes and secessionist bids by Soviet republics had made the collapse all but inevitable. The failed August 1991 coup by the Communist old guard was a major catalyst, dramatically eroding Gorbachev’s authority and encouraging more republics to seek independence. (AP Photo/Gene Berman, File)

FILE - A man tastes the sour cream, the only remaining dairy product available, at a state-owned store in Moscow, Monday, Dec. 24, 1991. By the fall of 1991, however, deepening economic woes and secessionist bids by Soviet republics had made the collapse all but inevitable. The failed August 1991 coup by the Communist old guard was a major catalyst, dramatically eroding Gorbachev’s authority and encouraging more republics to seek independence. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev checks the time on his watch before his resignation speech in the Kremlin on Wednesday, Dec. 25, 1991, drawing a line under more than 74 years of Soviet history. By the fall of 1991, however, deepening economic woes and secessionist bids by Soviet republics had made the collapse all but inevitable. The failed August 1991 coup by the Communist old guard was a major catalyst, dramatically eroding Gorbachev’s authority and encouraging more republics to seek independence. (AP-Photo/Liu Heung Shing, File)

FILE - Mikhail Gorbachev, eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, closes his resignation speech on the table after delivering it on Soviet television in the Kremlin, Moscow, Wednesday, Dec. 25, 1991, drawing a line under more than 74 years of Soviet history. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin, and in its place rose the white, blue, and red flag of Russia. (AP Photo/Liu Heung Shing, File)

FILE - Mikhail Gorbachev flashes the decree relinquishing control of nuclear weapons to Russian President Boris Yeltsin after its signature at the Kremlin in Moscow on Dec. 25, 1991, drawing a line under more than 74 years of Soviet history. By the fall of 1991, however, deepening economic woes and secessionist bids by Soviet republics had made the collapse all but inevitable. The failed August 1991 coup by the Communist old guard was a major catalyst, dramatically eroding Gorbachev’s authority and encouraging more republics to seek independence. (AP Photo/Liu Heung Shing, File)

FILE - Family members watch Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation speech on Soviet television in their downtown Moscow apartment, Russia, Dec. 25, 1991. Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation on Dec. 25, 1991, drawing a line under more than 74 years of Soviet history. (AP Photo/Sergei Kharpukhin, File)

FILE - The newly-raised Russian flag flutters in the wind over the Kremlin in Moscow in place of the Soviet flag which was removed immediately after the resignation of Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev, on Wednesday, Dec. 25, 1991. After Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25, 1991, people strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev holds a glass of vodka at his farewell party in Oktyabrskaya Hotel in Moscow on Dec. 26, 1991. While Gorbachev was taking desperate efforts to negotiate a new “union treaty” between Soviet republics to preserve the USSR in the fall of 1991, he faced stiff resistance from his arch-rival, Russian Federation’s head Boris Yeltsin, and other independent-minded leaders of Soviet republics. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - The Russian flag flies over the Kremlin between the spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, on Thursday, Dec. 26, 1991. After Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25, 1991, people strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses an extended meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board at the National Defense Control Center in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 21, 2021. Putin has described the Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” Speaking at his annual news conference, Putin held Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin responsible for handing Russian lands to Ukraine, helping “create a country that had never existed before.” (Mikhail Tereshchenko, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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MOSCOW (AP) — People strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25, 1991 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor.

Just minutes earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation, concluding 74 years of Soviet history.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev, now 90, bitterly lamented his failure to prevent the USSR’s demise, an event that upset the world’s balance of power and sowed the seeds of an ongoing tug-of-war between Russia and neighboring Ukraine.

“I still regret that I failed to bring the ship under my command to calm waters, failed to complete reforming the country,” Gorbachev wrote.

Political experts argue to this day whether he could have held onto his position and saved the USSR. Some charge that Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, could have prevented the Soviet breakup if he had moved more resolutely to modernize the anemic state-controlled economy while keeping tighter controls on the political system.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of those occasions in history that are believed to be unthinkable until they become inevitable,” Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, told The Associated Press. “The Soviet Union, whatever its long-term chances were, was not destined to go down when it did.”

By the fall of 1991, however, deepening economic woes and secessionist bids by Soviet republics had made the collapse all but certain. A failed August 1991 coup by the Communist old guard provided a major catalyst, dramatically eroding Gorbachev’s authority and encouraging more Soviet republics to seek independence.

While Gorbachev desperately tried to negotiate a new “union treaty” between the republics to preserve the USSR, he faced stiff resistance from his arch-rival, Russian Federation leader Boris Yeltsin, who was eager to take over the Kremlin and had backing from other independent-minded heads of Soviet republics.

On Dec. 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met in a hunting lodge, declaring the USSR dead and announcing the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Two weeks later, eight other Soviet republics joined the newly formed alliance, handing Gorbachev a stark choice: step down or try to avert the country’s breakup by force.

The Soviet leader analyzed the tough dilemma in his memoirs, noting that an attempt to order the arrest of the republics’ leaders could have resulted in a bloodbath amid split loyalties in the military and law enforcement agencies.

“If I had decided to rely on some part of the armed structures, it would have inevitably triggered an acute political conflict fraught with blood and far-reaching negative consequences,” Gorbachev wrote. “I couldn’t do that: I would have stopped being myself.”

What would have happened had Gorbachev resorted to force is hard to imagine in retrospect, the Carnegie Center’s Trenin observed..

“It might have unleashed bloody events in Moscow and across Russia, maybe across the Soviet Union, or it might have consolidated some things,” he said. “Had he decided to go down that route...there would have been blood on his hands. He would have had to turn into a sort of a dictator, because that would have...done away with his most important element of legacy; that is, not using force in a massive way.”

When the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine declared the Soviet Union defunct, they didn’t pay much attention to what would happen to the 4-million-strong Soviet military and its massive nuclear arsenals.

After the Soviet collapse, it took years of U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to persuade Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to hand over to Russia the Soviet nuclear weapons left on their territories — a process finally completed in 1996.

“The leaders of the republics that announced the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 did not think through all the consequences of what they were doing,” Gorbachev’s aide, Pavel Palazhchenko, told the AP.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose two decades at the helm is longer than Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s tenures combined, has famously described the Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

“The breakup of the Soviet Union was the collapse of a historic Russia,” Putin said in a documentary that aired this month on Russian state television. “We lost 40% of the territory, production capacities and population. We became a different country. What had been built over a millennium was lost to a large extent.”

The Kremlin moved to redraw the post-Soviet borders in 2014, responding to the ouster of Ukraine’s former Moscow-friendly leader by annexing the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula and throwing its weight behind separatist rebels in its neighbor’s east.

More than seven years of fighting in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland has killed over 14,000 people. Tensions flared up in recent weeks over a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine that fueled Western fears of an invasion.

Moscow has denied plans for an offensive and sternly urged the U.S. and its allies to provide a binding pledge that NATO wouldn’t expand to Ukraine or deploy weapons there — a demand rejected by the West.

Putin and his officials countered the Western argument that Russia doesn’t have a say in the alliance’s expansion by emphasizing the country’s right to protect its core security interests.

“Russia has never pretended to have the right of vote to make decisions for other countries,” Konstantin Kosachev, a deputy speaker of the upper house of Russian parliament, told the AP. “But we have an absolute right of vote to ensure our own interests and security, and to offer our vision of a security environment in the nearby regions.”

While Putin has repeatedly denied intentions to rebuild the USSR, he has described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” over angry protests from Kyiv and charged that Ukraine unfairly inherited historic parts of Russia in the Soviet demise.

The Russian leader further toughened his rhetoric Thursday amid spiraling tensions with the West, blaming Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin for handing Russian lands to Ukraine to “create a country that had never existed before.”

Harriet Morris, Tanya Titova and Anna Frants contributed to this report.

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Perestroika

By: History.com Editors

Updated: November 1, 2022 | Original: April 14, 2010

Perestroika (“restructuring” in Russian) refers to a series of political and economic reforms meant to kick-start the stagnant 1980s economy of the Soviet Union. Its architect, President Mikhail Gorbachev, oversaw the most fundamental changes to his nation’s economic engine and political structure since the Russian Revolution of 1917. But the suddenness of these reforms, coupled with growing instability both inside and outside the Soviet Union, would contribute to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.

Early Attempts at Reform

In May 1985, two months after coming to power, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a speech in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad ), in which he publicly criticized the inefficient economic system of the Soviet Union , making him the first Communist leader to do so.

This was followed by a February 1986 speech to the Communist Party Congress, in which he expanded upon the need for political and economic restructuring, or perestroika, and called for a new era of transparency and openness, or glasnost.

But by 1987, these early attempts at reform had achieved little, and Gorbachev embarked on a more ambitious program.

What Is Perestroika?

Gorbachev’s perestroika program loosened centralized control of many businesses, allowing some farmers and manufacturers to decide for themselves which products to make, how many to produce, and what to charge for them.

This incentivized them to aim for profits, but it also went against the strict price controls that had been the bedrock of Soviet economic policies. It was a move that rankled many high-ranking officials who had previously headed these powerful central committees.

In May 1988, Gorbachev introduced a new policy that allowed for the creation of limited co-operative businesses within the Soviet Union, which led to the rise of privately owned stores, restaurants and manufacturers. Not since the short-lived New Economic Policy of Vladimir Lenin , instituted in 1922 after the Russian civil war, had aspects of free-market capitalism been permitted in the U.S.S.R.

But even here, Gorbachev tread lightly. As William Taubman , historian and author of Gorbachev: His Life and Times , notes, “This was a way of introducing private enterprise without calling it that.”

In fact, the term “private property” was never even used. Many of these new co-ops became the basis of the oligarchical system that continues to control power in Russia today.

Gorbachev Relaxes Trade Restrictions

Gorbachev also peeled back restrictions on foreign trade, streamlining processes to allow manufacturers and local government agencies to bypass the previously stifling bureaucratic system of the central government.

He encouraged Western investment, although he later reversed his original policy, which called for these new business ventures to be majority Russian-owned and operated.

He also showed initial restraint when laborers began to push for increased protections and rights, with thousands protesting the wild inefficiencies of the Soviet coal industry. But he again reversed course when faced with pressure from hardliners after a massive strike by 300,000 miners in 1991.

Economic Reforms Backfire

While Gorbachev had instituted these reforms to jumpstart the sluggish Soviet economy, many of them had the opposite effect. The agricultural sector, for example, had provided food at low cost thanks to decades of heavy government subsidies.

Now, it could charge higher prices in the marketplace—prices many Soviets could not afford. Government spending and Soviet debt skyrocketed, and pushes by workers for higher wages led to dangerous inflation.

If Gorbachev faced opposition from the entrenched hardliners that he was moving too far, too fast, he was criticized for doing just the opposite by others. Some liberals called for full-fledged abolishment of central planning committees entirely, which Gorbachev resisted.

As Taubman notes, “His more radical critics would say he didn’t move fast enough to create a market economy, but the reason he didn’t was that the very effort to do so would produce chaos, which in fact it did under [former President Boris] Yeltsin .”

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Did Perestroika Play a Role in the Fall of the Soviet Union?

Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika and glasnost as well‑intentioned reforms to transform the Soviet Union.

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The Soviet Union, founded in 1922 on Marxist‑socialist principles, became one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world—before its fall and dissolution in 1991.

Political Reforms Under Perestroika

As reforms under glasnost revealed both the horrors of the Soviet past, and its present-day inefficiencies, Gorbachev moved to remake much of the political system of the U.S.S.R.

At a Party meeting in 1988, he pushed through measures calling for the first truly democratic elections since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Hardliners who supported this initially believed that the date for these elections would be far enough in the future that they could control the process. Instead, Gorbachev announced that they would be held just months later.

The resulting campaign for the new Congress of People’s Deputies was remarkable. While some Communist Party members reserved many of the seats for themselves, other hardliners went down to defeat at the ballot box to liberal reformers.

Former dissidents and prisoners—including Nobel laureate physicist and activist Andrei Sakharov —were elected, as candidates waged vigorous Western-style campaigns.

When the new Congress met for its first session in May 1989, newspapers, television and radio stations—newly empowered by the lifting of press restrictions under glasnost—devoted hours of time to the meetings, which featured open conflict between conservatives and liberals.

“Everybody stopped working,” Taubman says. “It was as if the whole country started watching television…the windows were open, and you could hear the debates coming out of apartment windows.” In 1990, Gorbachev became the first—and only—President of the Soviet Union.

Opponents of Perestroika

But as with economic reforms, many of these newly-elected reformers used their platforms to criticize what they still considered limited change. And the pushback by hardliners was just as fierce.

In March 1988, the largest newspaper in the Soviet Union published a full-throttled attack on Gorbachev by chemist and social critic Nina Andreyeva . The article, “I Cannot Forsake My Principles,” was likely written with the tacit approval of several members of the Politburo, the highest-echelon of the Communist Party, and was seen as an attempt to destabilize Gorbachev.

Gorbachev’s additional reforms—which allowed for the creation of political parties and increasingly shifted autonomy and control to local and regional bodies, rather than the central government—weakened his own base of support as the Communist Party lost its monopoly on political power in the vast Soviet Union.

International Events Under Perestroika

Gorbachev held firm on a promise to end Soviet involvement in a war in Afghanistan , which the U.S.S.R. invaded in 1979. After 10 controversial years and nearly 15,000 Soviet deaths, troops fully withdrew in 1989.

The Soviets began increasingly engaging with the West, and Gorbachev forged key relationships with leaders including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher , West German leader Helmut Kohl and most famously, United States President Ronald Reagan .

It was with the staunchly anti-Communist Reagan that Gorbachev, a new kind of Communist leader, achieved a series of landmark agreements, including the 1987 INF Treaty that eliminated all intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe. That same year, Reagan stood near the Berlin Wall and gave the most famous speech of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Results and Aftermath of Perestroika

The failure of Gorbachev’s perestroika hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. After decades of heavy-handed control over Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviet Union under Gorbachev eased their grip. In 1988, he announced to the United Nations that Soviet troop levels would be reduced, and later said that the U.S.S.R. would no longer interfere in the domestic affairs of those countries.

The remarkable speed of the collapse of these satellite countries was stunning: By the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and a divided East and West Germany were on the path to reunification , and relatively peaceful revolutions had brought democracy to countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania .

Inspired by reforms with the Soviet Union under both perestroika and glasnost, as well as the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, nationalist independence movements began to swell within the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980s.

As the difficulties of half a decade of reform rocked the Communist Party, Gorbachev attempted to right the ship, shifting his positions to appease both hardliners and liberals. His increasing appeals for Western support and assistance, particularly to President George H. W. Bush , went unheeded.

In August 1991, a coup by hardliners aligned with some members of the KGB attempted to remove Gorbachev, but he maintained in control, albeit temporarily.

In December, almost 75 years after the Russian Revolution ushered in the Communist Party era, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991. And with the fall of the Soviet Union , the Cold War was over.

Gorbachev: His Life and Times , by William Taubman (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire , by Victor Sebestyen (Vintage, 2010). Milestones of Perestroika: Spiegel Online . Greater Glasnost Turns Some Soviet Heads. The New York Times , November 9, 1986. Glasnost and Its Limits: Commentary Magazine (July, 1988). Perestroika and Glasnost: 17 Moments in Soviet History, Macalester College and Michigan State University . Perestroika, Library of Economics and Liberty . New Struggle in the Kremlin: How to Change the Economy. The New York Times , June 4, 1987). Perestroika: Reform that changed the world. BBC News , March 10 2015. Glasnost: RT Media .

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Gorbachev and glasnost: how his fragile legacy of free speech has been destroyed by Putin

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Mikhail Gorbachev was only Soviet leader for a little over six years, from 1985 to 1991, but they were six years that changed both his country and the world. His policies of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) gave ordinary citizens the opportunity to exercise real political freedoms, including freedom of speech.

You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here .

But although Gorbachev’s reforms were dramatic and far-reaching, it was never clear at the time whether they would be successful in changing the Soviet political and economic systems. Progress was often uncertain and subject to reversal. The opposition of powerful people with vested interests in maintaining the status quo was responsible for some delays. At other times the pace of progress was affected by Gorbachev’s own uncertainties about how fast and how far reform should go.

This was the case with glasnost – perhaps the most daring of all of the political changes that Gorbachev introduced. But while he spoke of the importance of trusting ordinary Soviet citizens with information, it was also clear that he intended for information to be used in a targeted way – to draw attention to specific problems identified by the political leadership. Gorbachev needed such publicity to generate the popular support that would help him overcome resistance to reform by conservatives in the communist party.

In fact glasnost failed its first test in April 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear power station suffered a catastrophic accident. The politburo delayed authorising the Soviet news media to report the true scale of the disaster, preventing timely countermeasures such as evacuation, and exposing people in Ukraine and Belarus to high levels of radiation.

But by the summer of 1986 Gorbachev renewed his commitment to glasnost by appointing journalists who were in favour of reform to edit newspapers, magazines and literary journals. Gorbachev’s practice of appointing like-minded editors was part of what the eminent scholar of the Soviet Union, Archie Brown, describes in his book The Gorbachev Factor as “guided glasnost”, and it was accompanied by another, intersecting process that Brown terms “glasnost from below”.

For while glasnost was envisioned by Gorbachev as a tool rather than an information free for all, it quickly took on a life of its own. The very journalists who had been appointed by the state used their new positions to push the boundaries of what was possible.

There was a clear steer from the Kremlin that the personalities and policies of the Brezhnev leadership of the 1970s could be criticised for creating the conditions for economic stagnation, but what about other periods of Soviet history? Could Stalin be criticised? Could Lenin? What about criticism of Gorbachev and perestroika itself?

The lack of boundaries between the permitted and the forbidden enabled editors to take chances and marked the start of investigative journalism in the Soviet Union. But the very absence of those red lines that created opportunities also meant that there was no real way for the journalists themselves to know exactly when they had crossed into the danger zone.

Taking risks for free speech

Everyone involved in trying to make glasnost in Soviet journalism a reality knew there was danger. When I was a student of Brown’s in the late 1980s, I was fortunate enough to hear Vitaly Korotich speak about his experiences editing the weekly magazine Ogonek . Korotich was one of those risk-taking journalists appointed by Gorbachev.

The magazine soon gained a reputation for publishing criticism of the Soviet system. Korotich spoke eloquently about the risks he and other journalists took daily and remarked that he never knew if the state would praise him as a hero or arrest him as a traitor.

Public struggles over the limits of journalistic freedom paved the way for the exercise of freedom of speech by society more broadly. Films were released that dealt with controversial topics, such as Repentence , which showed some of the horrors of the repression of the Stalin period. Civil society organisations were created, such as Memorial , founded in 1987 by nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov to lead honest investigations into the human rights abuses.

The televised debates of the newly-elected Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 featured the open questioning of Gorbachev and other members of the Soviet leadership, especially over the war in Afghanistan. Beginning in the late 1980s there were popular protests calling for independence in Soviet republics including Lithuania and Georgia .

These demonstrations were harshly repressed by the Soviet security forces , who killed many of the protesters. Even at a high point of glasnost, Gorbachev saw limits to freedom of speech, and it was the peoples of non-Russian republics who paid the price.

The trajectory of glasnost revealed a paradox: Gorbachev needed the active participation of society in politics to achieve his reforms, which meant granting certain political freedoms. But once given, political freedoms can be very difficult to control.

Putin takes back control

Vladimir Putin wasted little time in reestablishing state control over the political freedoms introduced by Gorbachev as soon as he came to power in 1999 – and reining in Russia’s flourishing independent media was high on the agenda.

Journalists’ access to Chechnya was severely restricted during Russia’s second war in that country (1999-2009), in sharp contrast to the coverage of the first war in the mid-1990s, which was extensive and uncensored.

Putin’s campaign to exert greater control over the oligarchs allowed him to deal with the media empires many of them owned. Vladimir Gusinsky lost the television channel NTV to the state-owned energy company Gazprom in 2001. In 2002 NTV cancelled one of its most popular programmes, Kukly, which was inspired by the British satirical comedy Spitting Image and which depicted Putin as a foul-mouthed baby .

Reporting the news became increasingly dangerous . The 2006 murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was widely attributed to the Russian state .

The final blow to Russia’s independent media was the legislation passed earlier this year, making it illegal to distribute “false news” about Russia’s war in Ukraine. News outlets such as the internet TV station Dozhd , the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta – which was founded in part by a donation from Gorbachev himself – all closed their operations in Russia.

Sadly, in the space of a generation, Russia has journeyed from state censorship to free speech and back again.

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“Tear Down This Wall”

How top advisers opposed reagan's challenge to gorbachev—but lost.

Summer 2007, Vol. 39, No. 2

By Peter Robinson

© 2007 by Peter Robinson  

Ronald Reagan speaking at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. (Ronald Reagan Library)

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     Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .     General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.     Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!     Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

In April 1987, when I was assigned to write the speech, the celebrations for the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin were already under way. Queen Elizabeth had already visited the city. Mikhail Gorbachev was due in a matter of days.

Although the President hadn't been planning to visit Berlin himself, he was going to be in Europe in early June, first visiting Rome, then spending several days in Venice for an economic summit. At the request of the West German government, his schedule was adjusted to permit him to stop in Berlin for a few hours on his way back to the United States from Italy.

I was told only that the President would be speaking at the Berlin Wall, that he was likely to draw an audience of about 10,000, and that, given the setting, he probably ought to talk about foreign policy.

Later that month I spent a day and a half in Berlin with the White House advance team—the logistical experts, Secret Service agents, and press officials who went to the site of every presidential visit to make arrangements. All that I had to do in Berlin was find material. When I met the ranking American diplomat in Berlin, I assumed he would give me some.

A stocky man with thick glasses, the diplomat projected an anxious, distracted air throughout our conversation, as if the very prospect of a visit from Ronald Reagan made him nervous. The diplomat gave me quite specific instructions. Almost all of it was in the negative. He was full of ideas about what the President shouldn't say. The most left-leaning of all West Germans, the diplomat informed me, West Berliners were intellectually and politically sophisticated. The President would therefore have to watch himself. No chest-thumping. No Soviet-bashing. And no inflammatory statements about the Berlin Wall. West Berliners, the diplomat explained, had long ago gotten used to the structure that encircled them.

After I left the diplomat, several members of the advance team and I were given a flight over the city in a U.S. Army helicopter. Although all that remains of the wall these days are paving stones that show where it stood, in 1987 the structure dominated Berlin. Erected in 1961 to stanch the flow of East Germans seeking to escape the Communist system by fleeing to West Berlin, the wall, a dozen feet tall, completely encircled West Berlin. From the air, the wall seemed to separate two different modes of existence.

On one side of the wall lay movement, color, modern architecture, crowded sidewalks, traffic. On the other lay a kind of void. Buildings still exhibited pockmarks from shelling during the war. Cars appeared few and decrepit, pedestrians badly dressed. When he hovered over Spandau Prison, the rambling brick structure in which Rudolf Hess was still being detained, soldiers at East German guard posts beyond the prison stared up at us through binoculars, rifles over their shoulders. The wall itself, which from West Berlin had seemed a simple concrete structure, was revealed from the air as an intricate complex, the East Berlin side lined with guard posts, dog runs, and row upon row of barbed wire. The pilot drew our attention to pits of raked gravel. If an East German guard ever let anybody slip past him to escape to West Berlin, the pilot told us, the guard would find himself forced to explain the footprints to his commanding officer.

A fragment of the Berlin Wall is displayed at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. ( Ronald Reagan Library )

That evening, I broke away from the advance team to join a dozen Berliners for dinner. Our hosts were Dieter and Ingeborg Elz, who had retired to Berlin after Dieter completed his career at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Although we had never met, we had friends in common, and the Elzes had offered to put on this dinner party to give me a feel for their city. They had invited Berliners of different walks of life and political outlooks—businessmen, academics, students, homemakers.

We chatted for a while about the weather, German wine, and the cost of housing in Berlin. Then I related what the diplomat told me, explaining that after my flight over the city that afternoon I found it difficult to believe. "Is it true?" I asked. "Have you gotten used to the wall?"

The Elzes and their guests glanced at each other uneasily. I thought I had proven myself just the sort of brash, tactless American the diplomat was afraid the President might seem. Then one man raised an arm and pointed. "My sister lives twenty miles in that direction," he said. "I haven't seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?" Another man spoke. Each morning on his way to work, he explained, he walked past a guard tower. Each morning, a soldier gazed down at him through binoculars. "That soldier and I speak the same language. We share the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which."

Our hostess broke in. A gracious woman, she had suddenly grown angry. Her face was red. She made a fist with one hand and pounded it into the palm of the other. "If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika," she said, "he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall."

Back at the White House I told Tony Dolan, then director of presidential speechwriting, that I intended to adapt Ingeborg Elz's comment, making a call to tear down the Berlin Wall the central passage in the speech. Tony took me across the street from the Old Executive Office Building to the West Wing to sell the idea to the director of communications, Tom Griscom. "The two of you thought you'd have to work real hard to keep me from saying no," Griscom now says. "But when you told me about the trip, particularly this point of learning from some Germans just how much they hated the wall, I thought to myself, 'You know, calling for the wall to be torn down—it might just work.'"

When I sat down to write, I'd like to be able to say, I found myself so inspired that the words simply came to me. It didn't happen that way. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. I couldn't even get that right. In one draft I wrote, "Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall," using "Herr" because I somehow thought that would please the President's German audience and "bring" because it was the only verb that came to mind. In the next draft I swapped "bring" for "take," writing, "Herr Gorbachev, take down this wall," as if that were some sort of improvement. By the end of the week I'd produced nothing but a first draft even I considered banal. I can still hear the clomp-clomp-clomp of Tony Dolan's cowboy boots as he walked down the hallway from his office to mine to toss that draft onto my desk.

"It's no good," Tony said.

"What's wrong with it?" I replied.

"I just told you. It's no good."

The following week I produced an acceptable draft. It needed work—the section on arms reductions, for instance, still had to be fleshed out—but it set out the main elements of the address, including the challenge to tear down the wall. On Friday, May 15, the speeches for the President's trip to Rome, Venice, and Berlin, including my draft, were forwarded to the President, and on Monday, May 18, the speechwriters joined him in the Oval Office. My speech was the last we discussed. Tom Griscom asked the President for his comments on my draft. The President replied simply that he liked it.

White House speechwriters meet with President Reagan in the Oval Office on May 18, 1987. Peter Robinson is second from the left. (Ronald Reagan Library)

"Mr. President," I said, "I learned on the advance trip that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany." Depending on weather conditions, I explained, radios would be able to pick up the speech as far east as Moscow itself. "Is there anything you'd like to say to people on the other side of the Berlin Wall?"

The President cocked his head and thought. "Well," he replied, "there's that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say to them."

I spent a couple of days attempting to improve the speech. I suppose I should admit that at one point I actually took "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" out, replacing it with the challenge, in German, to open the Brandenburg Gate, "Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf."

"What did you do that for?" Tony asked.

"You mean you don't get it?" I replied. "Since the audience will be German, the President should deliver his big line in German."

"Peter," Tony said, shaking his head, "when you're writing for the President of the United States, give him his big line in English." Tony put "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" right back in.

With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to squelch it. The assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs challenged the speech by telephone. A senior member of the National Security Council staff protested the speech in memoranda. The ranking American diplomat in Berlin objected to the speech by cable. The draft was naïve. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—my journal records that there were no fewer than seven—including one written by the diplomat in Berlin. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

Now in principle, State and the NSC had no objection to a call for the destruction of the wall. The draft the diplomat in Berlin submitted, for example, contained the line, "One day, this ugly wall will disappear." If the diplomat's line was acceptable, I wondered at first, what was wrong with mine? Then I looked at the diplomat's line once again. "One day?" One day the lion would lie down with the lamb, too, but you wouldn't want to hold your breath. "This ugly wall will disappear?" What did that mean? That the wall would just get up and slink off of its own accord? The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them, but "this ugly wall will disappear" ignored the question of human agency altogether. What State and the NSC were saying, in effect, was that the President could go ahead and issue a call for the destruction of the wall—but only if he employed language so vague and euphemistic that everybody could see right away he didn't mean it.

The week the President left for Europe, Tom Griscom began summoning me to his office each time State or the NSC submitted a new objection. Each time, Griscom had me tell him why I believed State and the NSC were wrong and the speech, as I'd written it, was right. When I reached Griscom's office on one occasion, I found Colin Powell, then deputy national security adviser, waiting for me. I was a 30-year-old who had never held a full-time job outside speechwriting. Powell was a decorated general. After listening to Powell recite all the arguments against the speech in his accustomed forceful manner, however, I heard myself reciting all the arguments in favor of the speech in an equally forceful manner. I could scarcely believe my own tone of voice. Powell looked a little taken aback himself.

A few days before the President was to leave for Europe, Tom Griscom received a call from the chief of staff, Howard Baker, asking Griscom to step down the hall to his office. "I walked in and it was Senator Baker [Baker had served in the Senate before becoming chief of staff] and the secretary of state—just the two of them." Secretary of State George Shultz now objected to the speech. "He said, 'I really think that line about tearing down the wall is going to be an affront to Mr. Gorbachev,'" Griscom recalls. "I told him the speech would put a marker out there. 'Mr. Secretary,' I said, 'The President has commented on this particular line and he's comfortable with it. And I can promise you that this line will reverberate.' The secretary of state clearly was not happy, but he accepted it. I think that closed the subject."

When the traveling party reached Italy (I remained in Washington), the secretary of state objected to the speech once again, this time to deputy chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein. "Shultz thought the line was too tough on Gorbachev," Duberstein says. On June 5, Duberstein sat the President down in the garden of the estate in which he was staying, briefed him on the objections to the speech, then handed him a copy of the speech, asking him to reread the central passage.

Reagan asked Duberstein's advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. "But I told him, 'You're President, so you get to decide.' And then," Duberstein recalls, "he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, 'Let's leave it in.'"

A page from the speaking copy that Reagan used in Berlin, showing the tear down this wall line. (Ronald Reagan Library)

The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. "They were still at it on the very morning of the speech," says Tony Dolan. "I'll never forget it." Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. "The boys at State are going to kill me," he said, "but it's the right thing to do."

Not long ago, Otto Bammel, a retired diplomat, told me what he had witnessed in November 1989, some two-and-a-half years after President Reagan delivered the Brandenburg Gate address. Representing the government of West Germany, Bammel was living with his wife and two sons, both of whom were in their early twenties, in an East Berlin home just a few hundred yards from the wall. During the evening of November 9, as the East German state council met in emergency session—a few days earlier there had been peaceful but massive demonstrations throughout East Berlin—Bammel and his oldest son, Karsten, watched television as an East German official held a press conference.

"It was so boring," Bammel said, "that I finally couldn't take any more. So I said, 'Karsten, you listen to the rest. I'm going into the kitchen for something to eat.' Ten minutes later Karsten came to me and said, 'The official just announced everyone can go through the wall! It's a decision made by the state council!' I didn't believe this could happen. It was an unbelievable event." Certain that his son had somehow misunderstood, Bammel took his wife to the home of a neighbor, where they were expected for dinner.

"When we got back at midnight we saw that our boys were still out," Bammel continued. "And we were surprised that there were so many cars driving within the city, but where the traffic goes and why it was, we did not know. We went to bed. When we got up at seven o'clock the next morning, we saw a piece of paper on our kitchen table from our youngest boy, Jens, telling us, 'I crossed the wall. I jumped over the wall at the Brandenburg Gate with my friends. I took my East Berlin friends with me.'

"I said to my wife, 'Something is wrong.' Without eating we took our bicycles and went to the border. And that was the first time we saw what happened in the night. There were people crossing the border on foot and in cars and on bicycles and motorbikes. It was just overwhelming. Nobody expected it. Nobody had the idea that it could happen. The joy about this event was just overwhelming all other thoughts. This was so joyful and so unbelievable."

There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan only managed to look good because he had clever writers putting words in his mouth. But Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton all had clever writers.

Why was there only one Great Communicator?

Because Ronald Reagan's writers were never attempting to fabricate an image, just to produce work that measured up to the standard Reagan himself had already established. His policies were plain. He had been articulating them for decades—until he became President he wrote most of his material himself.

When I heard Frau Elz say that Gorbachev should get rid of the wall, I knew instantly that the President would have responded to her remark. And when the State Department and National Security Council tried to block my draft by submitting alternate drafts, they weakened their own case. Their speeches were drab. They were bureaucratic. They lacked conviction. The people who wrote them had not stolen, as I had, from Frau Elz—and from Ronald Reagan.

Peter Robinson, an author and former White House speechwriter, is a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1983 Robinson joined President Ronald Reagan's staff, serving almost five years as speechwriter and special assistant to the President, an experience he recounts in his 2003 book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Robinson provided the chief executive with more than 300 speeches, including the 1987 Berlin Wall address.