Germany Unified and Europe Transformed

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Excerpts from the book:

• Gorbachev's "new thinking" was a reaction to a system in crisis. The problem was a structural one: The centralized, isolated, and heavily militarized character of the economy, which had its origins in the late 1920s.
• The Soviet economy was faltering, in part, because it was isolated from the world economy. Gorbachev's knowledge of the international economy and its key insititutions was limited. But he seemed to grasp one key point: the Soviet Union could not end its economic and political isolation without a fundamental shift in the foreign policies that had made it a pariah within the international system. (p 6)
• It did not take Gorbachev and his new team long to launch Soviet foreign poicy in a different direction, at first through energy and charm, attributes that their predecessors had certainly lacked. The old themes were still evident, casting the Soviet Union as the defender of world peace. But Gorbachev soon gave new meaning to his rhetoric about the impermissibility of war in the nuclear age. Within two years Gorbachev and his advisers had redefined the operational aspects of Soviet military doctrine. They admitted that the Soviet miliarty offensive presence in Europe was so large that it had become an impediment to good relations. (p 15)
• Gorbachev at a Soviet COmmunist party in the summer of 1988 announced that other socialist countries -the countries of Eastern Europe- would be permitted to find their own path without interference from the Soviet Union. (p 16)
• Gorbachev took two lessons from his studies. First, there were many roads to socialism, and ti was permissible to be guided by the historical conditions encountered in a given place or time. Second, there was nothing in Lenin that prevented one from adaptin socialism to radically different circumstances. (p 17)
• By 1988 the United States appeared to be defining an end to the Cold War as the achievement of three general goals:
  1. Stabilize and reduce any danger from U.S.-SOviet rivalry in the development and deployment of nuclear forces.
  2. Defuse and ameliorate any major areas of tension int eh U.S.-Soviet competition for influence or advantage in the third world.
  3. Persuade Moscow to move toward respect for the fundamental human rights of its citizens as a bsis for full Soviet participation in the international community.
• George Bush said the the Cold War could end only where it had begun - in Central and Eastern Europe, and above all Germany. (p 24)
• In early 1989 the German Democratic Republic did not seem to be threatened by serious instability. Indeed, it seemed the most solid of the East European states. It had only once - briefly in 1953 - experienced the kind of upheaval that had tormented communist leaders in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. (p 36)
• Western observers had long guessed or sensed that many East Germans probably despised and even hated the regime, but this bitterness had seemed to lapse into passive, cynical resignation. A tiny number of citizens were openly critical of the regime: representatives of the counterculture such as the leaders of peace, feminist, and ecological groups; a few figures in East Germany's literary establishment; and a handful of dissident Marxist intellectuals. (p 36)
• If there was a threat to the regime in East Berlin, it appeared to come from reformist elements within the ruling Socialist Unity party (SED). These reformers seemed ready to take their cue from Gorbachev and begin their own East German peristroika. (p 37)