I never regretted my decision. To resist the will of a people to save the doomed regime of Erich Honecker would have been hopeless. The use of force could have resulted in a huge bloodbath–after all, the desire for unification had seized millions of Germans in the fall of 1989–and might have led to a military confrontation between the superpowers. Even if we could have avoided that, intervention would have meant reversing the basic principles of my political philosophy. Military action would have ruined the trust that was developing with the West and the United States, and would have cut off vital foreign economic and political support for perestroika. And it would have meant shooting ordinary people, which was against my moral principles. The cold war would have been revived and my political position as a whole would have been discredited.
At the time, nobody argued otherwise. None of the members of the Politburo, or indeed anyone from the senior Soviet leadership, suggested the use of force. Nobody recommended that Soviet troops in East Germany be mobilized. It’s true that several generals privately discussed such a possibility–and openly criticized me later for not sending in troops. But at the time, not even Marshal Yazov, the Defense minister and future coup leader, lobbied for intervention.
What was there to fight for? Communism–as the inventors of the theory imagined it–never existed anywhere: not in Eastern Europe, not in the U.S.S.R. What did exist was Stalinist socialism. That system had exhausted itself and was doomed to disappear. As early as 1988, I insisted that the party abandon its monopoly on power, on property, on ideology. The idea was to liquidate the political power structures which had ruled Russia since Stalin’s time.
Once the forces of glasnost and democracy were let loose, they worked in unpredictable ways. They were decisive in spurring changes in Eastern Europe, but I can’t deny that those same forces encouraged separatist tendencies in the national republics of the U.S.S.R. Now I see no threat to Russian security because of the entry of Eastern European countries into NATO. Yet their understandable early aversion to their “big brother to the East” has turned into a policy of refusing to have any significant relations with Russia. This is not good for Russia, nor for East Europe, nor the world.
