Thirty years ago, I was a sophomore in high school, watching wide-eyed as the world around me changed in ways beyond my wildest imagination. I'd grown up with the world divided in two between the West and the Soviet bloc. Admittedly, India and a few other nations claimed to occupy a middle space between those two blocs but it was a position that even we Indians considered little more than a lot of posturing and talk devoid of real policy; after all most of India's advanced weapons came from the Soviet Union and our government tended to back Soviet policy more often than not. Even our economy was patterned heavily on the Soviet model, to the chagrin of many middle class Indians. By contrast, outside the bureaucracy and a few elite schools, many Indians had a positive view of America and we dreamed of opportunities in the West, especially America.
In the latter half of the Eighties, I was still a little young to follow the world news but I'd heard words like "perestroika" and "glasnost" (perhaps because we were not in America, I heard less about Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech) and was beginning to realize that Mikhail Gorbachev was a leader unlike any other USSR Chairman. But in India, we still had many other problems to focus on, far more immediate than the seemingly small changes in policy within the Warsaw Pact nations - India was still in the middle of the violent Punjab secessionist struggle and its attendant terrorism, while the Kashmir insurgency was in its nascent stages (little did we suspect that the Punjab violence was about to end while thirty years on, Kashmir still burns), while a government elected with so much hope in 1984 (naive hope, it must be admitted and based on more emotion than facts) had set new records in corruption while failing to generate any economic change (and sadly had set in motion other events that would haunt India for the next three decades); closer home, for a kid interested in warfare, there was the Iran-Iraq war and the Sri Lankan Tamil insurgency.
But I remember the news when Solidarity and Lech Walesa were allowed to dethrone the Communist Party in Poland and suddenly things began to happen all over the world. I avidly followed the news daily that spring as Chinese students flooded Tienanmen Square, demanding reforms and democracy and for a few breathless weeks it seemed that the largest communist nation might bow to popular sentiment. But in June that dream was brutally and bloodily crushed beneath the treads of tanks in the kind of crackdown that I never dreamed possible (I had clearly never heard of Hama, or Iraqi Kurds at that time). For a dark moment, the forces of freedom and democracy were stymied, but if China's Deng Xiaoping was willing to keep his throne afloat on a sea of his people's blood, in Eastern Europe Gorbachev and most of his fellow strongmen were more circumspect. As the year drew to a close, the foundations of the iron curtain crumbled before the desire of people to be free and in November the greatest symbol of that curtain, and ironically the greatest symbol of communism's failure was torn down in an unplanned and explosive outpouring of popular sentiment. I will never forget that evening, as I listened to the BBC reporter describing the scenes as Germans tore down the physical barrier that divided their national soul.
It was a moment of hope, the kind of moment that comes but once in a lifetime. Hope, for a free world; hope, for a brighter future; hope for actual peace in our time; hope, for a world without walls and fences to divide us; hope, for a single world united in brotherhood. What fools, what hopeful fools we were! to dream of peace and universal equality. If the Prague Spring had ended too soon, this time surely, with the Soviet Union tottering, that bud would survive and grow into a great flowering tree of peace.
And yet, we should have known better. The signs were there, if not so clear on that day in November, soon enough in the weeks and months that followed. While the majority of East European nations were able to throw off the shackles of their communist oppressors, they had a stable history that predated their communist governments. But the Balkans showed how the loss of communist control also released the demons of sectarianism and reopened wounds still fresh and painful. And that was in Europe's backyard. Beyond Europe, there were myriad warlords that had survived by currying favor of either the US or USSR; now robbed of their importance, they clung to power through violence against their own people or through nationalist rhetoric. Ancient, and not so ancient enmities were awakened anew, and while the world has generally contained the more overt outbreaks of violence, we remain far removed from that dream of 1989. Can we ever return to that point? To be honest, I don't know if we ever were quite at that point as I imagined it. For me, that year was part of such a profound upheaval in my world, and I was still learning that my naivete imbued that moment in November 1989 with far greater hope than it deserved. But if the dregs that followed that drought of sweet hope were bitter regret for what might have been, nevertheless, I will never regret that first blush of excitement or the very real change that rung in across Europe that night. In the end, it was not the moment that lied, but that we failed our test in history and continue to pay the price today.
In the latter half of the Eighties, I was still a little young to follow the world news but I'd heard words like "perestroika" and "glasnost" (perhaps because we were not in America, I heard less about Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech) and was beginning to realize that Mikhail Gorbachev was a leader unlike any other USSR Chairman. But in India, we still had many other problems to focus on, far more immediate than the seemingly small changes in policy within the Warsaw Pact nations - India was still in the middle of the violent Punjab secessionist struggle and its attendant terrorism, while the Kashmir insurgency was in its nascent stages (little did we suspect that the Punjab violence was about to end while thirty years on, Kashmir still burns), while a government elected with so much hope in 1984 (naive hope, it must be admitted and based on more emotion than facts) had set new records in corruption while failing to generate any economic change (and sadly had set in motion other events that would haunt India for the next three decades); closer home, for a kid interested in warfare, there was the Iran-Iraq war and the Sri Lankan Tamil insurgency.
But I remember the news when Solidarity and Lech Walesa were allowed to dethrone the Communist Party in Poland and suddenly things began to happen all over the world. I avidly followed the news daily that spring as Chinese students flooded Tienanmen Square, demanding reforms and democracy and for a few breathless weeks it seemed that the largest communist nation might bow to popular sentiment. But in June that dream was brutally and bloodily crushed beneath the treads of tanks in the kind of crackdown that I never dreamed possible (I had clearly never heard of Hama, or Iraqi Kurds at that time). For a dark moment, the forces of freedom and democracy were stymied, but if China's Deng Xiaoping was willing to keep his throne afloat on a sea of his people's blood, in Eastern Europe Gorbachev and most of his fellow strongmen were more circumspect. As the year drew to a close, the foundations of the iron curtain crumbled before the desire of people to be free and in November the greatest symbol of that curtain, and ironically the greatest symbol of communism's failure was torn down in an unplanned and explosive outpouring of popular sentiment. I will never forget that evening, as I listened to the BBC reporter describing the scenes as Germans tore down the physical barrier that divided their national soul.
It was a moment of hope, the kind of moment that comes but once in a lifetime. Hope, for a free world; hope, for a brighter future; hope for actual peace in our time; hope, for a world without walls and fences to divide us; hope, for a single world united in brotherhood. What fools, what hopeful fools we were! to dream of peace and universal equality. If the Prague Spring had ended too soon, this time surely, with the Soviet Union tottering, that bud would survive and grow into a great flowering tree of peace.
And yet, we should have known better. The signs were there, if not so clear on that day in November, soon enough in the weeks and months that followed. While the majority of East European nations were able to throw off the shackles of their communist oppressors, they had a stable history that predated their communist governments. But the Balkans showed how the loss of communist control also released the demons of sectarianism and reopened wounds still fresh and painful. And that was in Europe's backyard. Beyond Europe, there were myriad warlords that had survived by currying favor of either the US or USSR; now robbed of their importance, they clung to power through violence against their own people or through nationalist rhetoric. Ancient, and not so ancient enmities were awakened anew, and while the world has generally contained the more overt outbreaks of violence, we remain far removed from that dream of 1989. Can we ever return to that point? To be honest, I don't know if we ever were quite at that point as I imagined it. For me, that year was part of such a profound upheaval in my world, and I was still learning that my naivete imbued that moment in November 1989 with far greater hope than it deserved. But if the dregs that followed that drought of sweet hope were bitter regret for what might have been, nevertheless, I will never regret that first blush of excitement or the very real change that rung in across Europe that night. In the end, it was not the moment that lied, but that we failed our test in history and continue to pay the price today.
