Errors of Reunification
Part 1
The Root
Much can be said about Mikhail Gorbachev. No one can deny that he was a thoroughly decent man. “I am (profoundly) convinced of Mr. Gorbachev’s integrity,” Franz Josef Strauß once wrote in the Bayernkurier, right after his flight to Moscow, where he himself sat at the controls of the aircraft.
It is equally well known and a matter of common sense that, while Gorbachev was a good man, he had no understanding of economics whatsoever. This is no reproach. In Russia there had previously been a blind spot on the map of economics. How is a colour-blind man supposed to explain pale lilac and yellow-green? And how was he supposed to engineer a 180-degree turn of such a vast, decaying great power and make it succeed - in real time, without a concept, and against the ranks of hardline former apparatchiks?
Gorbachev erased the brutal, decades-long stain of the Second World War by committing a systemic betrayal of the GDR leadership. He did so openly and confrontationally, with the famous sentence: “He who comes too late is punished by life.”
Without Mikhail Gorbachev there would have been no reunification. He gave the Germans unity - an enormous territorial advantage and the dream of tens of millions of people. It was a historical correction and, in view of the horrors and the blood toll of two world wars, also an act of grace.
When Greece later hung by a thread during the euro crisis and the European order, conception and, yes, the economy itself were on life support, the German government -Finance Minister Schäuble- offered to send German tax officials. The offer failed because of Greek resistance; propagandistic parallels were drawn to the Nazi era, occupation mentality and the like. In some places the wounds of the Second World War still bleed deep in the heart.
Mikhail Gorbachev was free of all that nonsense. He was a friend. Everyone called him a friend - politicians, the media and ordinary people.
Did Germany ever send a team of economic experts and countless other specialists to this friend of ours? Did we establish lasting cooperation and support with the friend we so highly praised? We saw - and the media openly said so - that our friend had no understanding of economics. And for a long time we watched, almost voyeuristically, as our friend in that dark giant empire slowly drove into the wall and failed more and more.
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It went as far as the hostage-taking of the Gorbachev couple. And then, from somewhere, the finger-amputated, permanently alcoholised dancing bear appeared. Boris Yeltsin, through his political and civilian resistance in Moscow, was largely responsible for the failure of the August 1991 putsch and for Gorbachev’s unharmed release from house arrest - this is the precise account given by AI on the subject.
With every further stage of Yeltsin’s failure his blood-alcohol levels rose, and once again we stood by like rubberneckers at a motorway accident, gaping. Like people tipping a few coins into a toilet attendant’s dish whenever he made a scene, we repeatedly quietened him for a while. This happened with a certain regularity - during sauna visits in Russia, for example. Figuratively speaking, we gave him something to eat instead of seed and the knowledge needed to cultivate the barren field.
We not only violated, in the grossest way, the very philosophies that had been drilled into us from the ground up. Even some developing countries sometimes receive more structural aid.
What finally drove the by-then obviously alcohol-dependent Yeltsin - or what forces stood behind him - to install Putler as his successor, we do not know. In any case he even provided a personal budget for the purpose. Either it mattered a great deal to him, or he was left with no other choice by whoever it may have been. A great deal of frustration had certainly built up over the years amid all the turbulence of that vast realm; as already said, the economy was not working.
No. We did not cultivate friendships or share participation in global prosperity. We quickly pocketed a territory and otherwise left our friends to perish with an outstretched hand.
And today that successor of Yeltsin’s is waging a barbaric war in the heart of Europe. For four years now it has been a horrific massacre and the total destruction of an entire country - a demonic extinguishing of so many hopes and dreams, of human beings and, yes, of the dream of a finally pacified continent of ‘eternal unrest’ after two of the darkest world wars imaginable. That vision was the very first casualty of the Ukraine war. Decades of the most painstaking diplomatic labour have been nullified; the dials have been turned back to the era of the Cold War. Future generations will still need decades to repair the relationships. And yes, even a great collision currently threatens.
Part 2
The Soil
to follow
