And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

Sovietback Saturday puts aside the works of dead cartoonists this week to dredge up my own stuff from the momentous year 1989. That fall, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded in ousting three opponents of his glasnost and perestroika policies from the politburo, and even authorized a new degree of freedom for the state-run press.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., October 19, 1989

All the same, eyebrows were raised around the world when the Soviet news agency TASS reported, in all seriousness, that a three-eyed space alien clad in silver overalls and bronze boots landed in Voronezh and shot a 16-year-old boy with a device that made him disappear for a few minutes. Nor was it the only such story in Soviet media; Komsomolskaya Pravda reported finding a landing field for flying saucers near Perm, and printed a psychic interview with an extraterrestrial from the red star of the constellation of Libra.

Erich Honecker, head of state of East Germany since 1971, had been the communist official in charge of building the Berlin Wall in 1961. As protests in East Germany mounted and refugees from his regime found an escape route through Hungary and Czechoslovakia around his fortified East-West German border, Gorbachev rejected Honecker's pleas for Soviet help crushing dissidents. The 77-year-old Honecker was forced to resign on October 18.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., October 26, 1989

The George H.W. Bush administration faced challenges in its own hemisphere: an attempted coup with U.S. backing in Panama failed to overthrow Manuel Noriega, who had voided the results of a fraud-riddled presidential elections in May rather than admit that his candidate had lost.

Through his rise from the Panamanian army, and head of intelligence, to becoming the country's military leader, Noriega had been on the CIA payroll since 1971. He helped fund the right-wing Contras in their civil war against the Nicaraguan government; U.S. intelligence agencies were well aware that drug trafficking was key to Noriega's financial assistance. When U.S. funding of the Contras came to an end after Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, the Contra insurgency came to an end and so did Noriega's usefulness to the CIA. He was suspected, furthermore, of passing intelligence on to the communist government of Cuba, the Medellin drug cartel, and anyone else who greased his palms.

in UW-M Post, November 9, 1989

The seas would prove no calmer —literally — during the U.S.-U.S.S.R. cruise summit in December.

Earlier posts have dealt with on the Polish situation, but I've given short shrift to what was going on in Hungary, the first country to go communist after World War I and the first country to be invaded by Russia after World War II. Fast forward to 1989, and Hungarian acting President Matyas Szuros publicly described the 1956 uprising as a "national independence movement" and declared that his nation was no longer a "People's Republic," which would certainly have gotten him hauled off to Moscow in chains 33 years earlier. Crowds on the streets jeered at Russian soldiers to go home, yet cheered Moscow's new leader with shouts of "Gorby! Gorby!"

in UW-M Post,  November 14, 1989

Then, in late October, Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Edvard Schevardnadze announced the eventual dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Brezhnev doctrine — the U.S.S.R. policy that "when forces hostile to socialism seek to reverse the development of any socialist country whatsoever," the Soviet military would invade and impose the Kremlin's will. In the words of Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, "You know the Frank Sinatra song My Way? Hungary and Poland are doing it their way. We now have the Sinatra doctrine."

And on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, November 16, 1989

I grew up in a world that had the freedom-loving democratic countries of Anglo America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand on the one side; and the rigid authoritarian communist countries on the other; and a whole lot of other countries stuck in a tug-of-war between them. There was an eternal state of Cold War, a precarious balancing act which could tumble into instant global annihilation at the slightest misstep anywhere.

As of November 9, 1989, all that changed. We saw a new age of peace and cooperation forged from the remnants of the Iron Curtain. There was talk of the "end of history," whatever that meant. If people in Russia and Eastern Europe had the power to triumph over their oppressive governments, perhaps people everywhere could find that same power.

in UW-M Post, November 30, 1989

P.S.: Speaking of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tienanmen, and all that, there's a 1991 cartoon of mine on page 368 of this rather formidable tome hot off the presses at Harper Collins in London:

...and in the soon-to-be published German translation from Random House GmbH. (It has been in this blog before, and no doubt will show up again two years hence.)