CNN Cold War Set 2_12of14_Conclusions 1989-1991
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00:00After six months in office as president, George Bush at last decided it was time for a summit
00:14with Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:15I said, I want to meet Gorbachev, and I want to do it soon.
00:21I felt it was important, but we had different feelings inside our administration, still
00:26some wariness about the reality of the change and what Gorbachev's heartbeat really was,
00:32what his pulse really was.
00:37The George Bush administration spent a long time deciding what their policy should be,
00:43whether to continue that of President Reagan, when George Bush was vice president, or to
00:50make a change.
00:56Bush and Gorbachev would meet to try to end the Cold War.
01:00But for Gorbachev, beset by problems at home, the question was, would the Soviet Union itself
01:36It took time to fix a venue for the summit, but finally Gorbachev and Bush agreed to meet
01:57in the Mediterranean on board ship.
02:01We finally hit upon Malta because it was a nice, peaceful harbour, a place that they
02:05never had bad weather, and nobody would get seasick.
02:13But they did get seasick.
02:16We had a weather satellite tracking station on board the ship, so we were able to keep
02:20track of weather across the Mediterranean and around the world.
02:24And we saw a little storm developing toward Gibraltar, and it really stayed right over
02:29Malta.
02:33The world changed dramatically between President Bush's first overture to Gorbachev in, I believe,
02:38August, and December, when we actually met.
02:41The wall had come down in Berlin, Poland was no longer a communist country, Hungary was
02:50no longer a communist country.
02:53Everything had changed.
02:57We surprised people by coming forward with an agenda.
03:02Here's what we're going to do with you.
03:05And before we even got through the first pleasantries, we unleashed this on him.
03:14They came well prepared.
03:17The discussion was interesting.
03:20We met one to one.
03:22Only our assistants were present.
03:26He laid out his vision and proposals, and I agreed.
03:30We had the same views.
03:34Our discussions moved on to a new level.
03:40Outside the storm rose higher.
03:42The Americans left the Russian ship and couldn't get back.
03:48The talks didn't restart till the next day.
03:53President Bush said something about America's allies wanting the United States to stay in
03:57Europe.
03:58And Gorbachev said, we want the United States to stay in Europe, too.
04:01The United States is a European power.
04:04And given the history, where we had always believed, and where all of us who had been
04:09taught about the Cold War believed that it was the principal goal of Soviet power to
04:15get America out of Europe, this was an extraordinary statement.
04:19And it stuck with everybody.
04:20Malta was the place where, for the first time, we said we no longer considered each
04:29other enemies.
04:37Sentence was passed on the Cold War.
04:44Leaving Malta, Gorbachev now had to face grave difficulties within the USSR.
04:51Beyond its borders, he could accept change.
04:58Prague, Czechoslovakia.
05:07The Communist Party was still in power.
05:12On November the 19th, Civic Forum, an opposition group, was formed.
05:19Among them, the playwright Václav Havel.
05:22They met in the Magic Lantern Theatre underground.
05:29Society was already pregnant with problems.
05:35It was clear that sooner or later the regime would collapse.
05:40But nobody knew exactly when or how.
05:45In this sort of situation, a snowball can start an avalanche.
05:57Protesters in Prague were persistent and good-humoured.
06:00They jangled keys to make their point to the government.
06:04Your time is up.
06:09There was an atmosphere of non-violence, of tolerance.
06:16People of very different views under a common thread worked well together.
06:25It worked.
06:26Our secretariat of the Central Committee are at our disposal.
06:46Present that day was Aleksandr DubÄŤek, the Communist leader deposed by Soviet tanks
06:52in the Prague Spring of 1968.
07:03It was a clear sign that the regime was starting to give up.
07:06It didn't give up easily, but it was an important breakthrough.
07:23As people found their voices, Czechoslovakia was finding democracy again.
07:34Before the year's end, Václav Havel was elected president.
07:38It came to be called the Velvet Revolution.
07:42No blood was spilt here.
07:51Timisoara, Romania.
07:58In mid-December, during riots against the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, security
08:03forces shot dead 73 men and women.
08:08The tyrant Ceaușescu was ruthless in suppressing opposition.
08:20In Bucharest, on December the 21st, the Romanian government staged a pro-Ceaușescu rally.
08:27These workers were sent here to cheer him.
08:32I would also like to thank the initiators and organisers of this great popular rally
08:48in Bucharest, considering it a...
08:57The crowd began to jeer.
09:02State television took the pictures off the air.
09:10It was too late.
09:12There was fighting throughout the night.
09:21Next day, crowds stormed the Central Committee building and charged upstairs.
09:31Ceaușescu and his wife escaped by helicopter.
09:34An aide held a gun to the pilot's head.
09:51It was important to call on the whole population of Romania to get out on the streets so that
09:56they could paralyse the country, and that was what happened.
10:03It was important to say that Ceaușescu had fled in his helicopter because people couldn't
10:08believe what was happening.
10:14That same day, Ceaușescu was captured.
10:17He and his wife had got just 45 miles from Bucharest.
10:25In the muddle and confusion that followed, different factions fought it out in the streets.
10:35Nearly a thousand were killed.
10:47The Ceaușescus were tried by court-martial.
11:17Sentence was carried out.
11:39No one faked the actual execution, but the corpses were real enough.
11:49It reassured me to know Ceaușescu was dead, even though we're humanists and I'm a poet.
11:58If he hadn't died, then we would have died, and that's the truth.
12:07The executioners took care their victim could be recognised.
12:20It was in the Soviet Union itself that Gorbachev faced insuperable problems.
12:26He could allow freedom to the satellites, but would he allow it to the Soviet republics?
12:33There were 15 separate republics.
12:36Most wanted independence.
12:42The Soviet Communist Party was losing control.
12:47Goods in the shops were scarce.
12:53We rightly chose freedom, democracy, glasnost and pluralism.
12:59But we got one thing wrong.
13:02People judged the state of the country by what they could or couldn't buy in the markets
13:06and shops.
13:13Many older people found the pace of change upsetting.
13:21We promised that things would get better, but things were getting worse and worse.
13:26We should have allowed freedom of trade, but Gorbachev didn't dare.
13:34Making the transition to a market economy was hard, but they did allow the opening of
13:38Moscow's first McDonald's.
13:41The young wanted pop music, fashion, the chance to make money, the right to travel.
13:50Society moved on and the party stayed where it was.
13:55People started running like rats from a sinking ship.
14:01Gorbachev gave Soviet citizens for the first time the freedom to demonstrate.
14:07Now demonstrations called for an end to the Communist Party's monopoly of power.
14:16But Communist hardliners opposed reform.
14:21Despite them, Gorbachev, himself a Communist, chose pluralism.
14:29The Communist Party, which had ruled since the October Revolution of 1917, would have
14:35to share power with others.
14:40It was a complete break with the practice of Lenin and Stalin.
14:47Of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation was the largest.
14:53Most were responding to Gorbachev's loosening control with demands for national freedom.
15:01In the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, annexed by Stalin in 1940, the
15:07demand was total independence.
15:21In January 1990, Gorbachev had gone to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to argue that the
15:27Soviet Union must not be broken up.
15:46Despite Gorbachev, the other Baltic states, Estonia and Latvia, followed Lithuania's
15:52lead and also demanded independence.
16:02He was trying to dam a river that was in full flood, but the current was too strong.
16:11It broke the dam and flooded everything in its path.
16:19Boris Yeltsin had been Communist Party chief in Moscow.
16:23Popular, ambitious, he now used economic discontent to weaken Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.
16:33In May 1990, he was chosen parliamentary leader of the Russian Republic.
16:38Yeltsin is a very good man for Russian people.
16:44Gorbachev, Bush, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
16:52People began to question Gorbachev's reforms.
16:56They started to listen to demagogues who promised that everything would be better tomorrow.
17:08Yeltsin's struggle with Gorbachev was out in the open.
17:12Russia, richest of the republics, would be Yeltsin's road to power.
17:21Gorbachev would never really acknowledge that the Soviet Union would break up.
17:32Yeltsin recognized that it was inevitable.
17:39And he was one of the first to take the initiative, saying that Russia should declare its sovereignty
17:44and independence.
17:47Indeed, that's how he actually urged the other republics to become independent.
18:00On the international scene, Gorbachev was still the man the West could do business with.
18:09At their meetings, Gorbachev asked Bush for help in his economic difficulties.
18:21Bush warned Gorbachev not to use violence if the Baltic states pushed for independence.
18:28It looked like the Soviet Union was coming unstuck a little bit.
18:32At that point, I think we started to believe we were in a race to try to finish the business
18:37of ending the Cold War with Gorbachev still in power.
18:47The Red Army was pulling out of an Eastern Europe it had dominated for decades.
19:00In Germany, the troops would leave a question mark behind them.
19:05Divided by the Cold War, Germany was moving towards unification.
19:10Would the Soviet Union really allow a united Germany to belong to the West's military alliance,
19:17Personally, for Gorbachev and for me, it wasn't a problem.
19:28But it was a problem for Soviet society, which had gone through the terrible war with fascist
19:33Germany and suffered the death of 20 or 30 million people.
19:40They really ended up not having any other alternative.
19:43If they really meant what they said about we will not use force to keep the empire together,
19:51that meant that a country should be free to choose its own alliances.
20:02The West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, undertook to limit Germany's military strength, to pay
20:07the Red Army's resettlement costs, not to station nuclear weapons in East Germany.
20:15Kohl was ecstatic.
20:18Gorbachev had accepted that a united Germany could belong to NATO.
20:25We called the agreement between Gorbachev and Kohl, VE Day 2, because it really was
20:34That was the end of the Cold War.
20:41The divided Germany at the heart of the Cold War was reunited.
20:52August the 2nd, 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait.
20:57Iraq was a Soviet ally.
20:59In spite of Iraqi-Soviet ties, Secretary of State Baker succeeded in persuading Shevardnadze
21:06to a joint condemnation of the invasion.
21:09The minister has indicated that there was some difficulty on the part of the Soviet
21:16Union in coming to this agreement.
21:22Shevardnadze had consulted Gorbachev, but he knew their hardline enemies would use it
21:27against them.
21:36In Moscow, the daily lines for food grew longer.
21:41Tempers rose.
21:42Can you imagine, we'd live to see the day when we needed coupons to buy socks.
22:02There weren't even any socks available.
22:05There was nothing on the shelves except out-of-date tins of fish.
22:09That was the result of perestroika.
22:14When Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin suggested a new way forward, of course, people supported
22:18him.
22:24Russia, where Yeltsin and his radical Democrats were taking over, had practically declared
22:39independence from the Soviet Union.
22:43They adopted law after law that replaced the laws of the Soviet Union.
22:53All that winter, Gorbachev was harassed by pressures from each side for reform and against
22:59it.
23:03In December, Eduard Shevardnadze resigned.
23:07With Gorbachev sitting stony-faced, he warned of a hardline coup.
23:23Gorbachev had changed tack.
23:26He tightened security and brought hardliners into government.
23:32He appointed Gennady Yanayev his deputy.
23:35Yanayev declared, I am a communist to the depths of my soul.
23:44Vilnius, Lithuania.
23:46On the 11th and 12th of January, 1991, crack Soviet troops entered the capital to take
23:51back public buildings for the Soviet state.
24:04Republicans flocked to defend their parliament and the radio and television stations.
24:16In the early hours of January the 13th, Soviet tanks attacked.
24:22If Lithuania were allowed to break free, there would be nothing to stop the other republics
24:26doing the same.
24:36Some people tried to push the tank back with their bare hands.
24:46My legs got tangled.
24:49I stumbled and fell on my back.
24:55I felt the tank treads pressing on my legs.
25:05I didn't feel great pain, but I was shouting very loudly with all my strength, Mama.
25:13Loretta's leg was saved.
25:17In the fighting, hundreds were injured.
25:20Fourteen were killed.
25:28In Moscow, thousands marched to protest against the crackdown.
25:37Gorbachev, caught in the middle, defended his government's actions.
26:00Army Day, 1991.
26:06The banners say, strong army, strong union, and no to capitalism in the Soviet Union.
26:15Back to the old ways.
26:34In summer, Gorbachev went to London.
26:36As usual, he basked in the welcome he received overseas.
26:44He had business to do.
26:46At the United States Embassy, he met Bush and agreed the terms of another new deal on
26:51arms limitation.
26:58But for the Soviet economy, the urgent need was for financial aid.
27:05Gorbachev asked the leading capitalist countries for massive loans.
27:12In seeking to end the Cold War, he was doing them all a favor.
27:16But in spite of the smiles and the handshakes, they turned him down flat.
27:27In Moscow, his enemies were preparing to move against him.
27:34I wrote a letter to Gorbachev, warning him that trouble was brewing.
27:43He replied, Alexander, you overestimate their intelligence and courage.
27:51In July, I resigned.
27:53I said, something's cooking, I can sense it.
27:57He ignored me and went on holiday.
28:05Gorbachev had drafted a new union treaty, loosening the ties between the Soviet center
28:10and the republics.
28:13When it was due for signature in August, hardline communists were appalled.
28:19Boris Pugo, Dmitry Yazov, Gennady Yanaev, Vladimir Khruchkov.
28:29When I read the text for the first time on the 15th of August, I was amazed by the fact
28:34that we only had four days left to the end of the Soviet Union.
28:41On August the 18th, a delegation arrived in the Crimea, where Gorbachev was on holiday.
28:48They demanded he declare a state of emergency and hand over power.
28:54He refused and was put under house arrest.
29:02On August the 19th, Moscow awoke to the sound of tanks and the news that Gorbachev was ill.
29:08An emergency committee had taken over.
29:16This is a CNN special report.
29:19Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev is, according to the official Soviet task news agency, out
29:23of office at this hour, replaced by his vice president, Gennady Yanaev.
29:28The White House, we are told, has now been informed.
29:31President Bush is apparently checking with officials on the situation.
29:35Let me make a few comments about these momentous and stunning events.
29:42While we're still watching the situation unfold, and it still is unfolding, all is
29:47not clear, it seems clearer all the time that, contrary to official statements out of Moscow,
29:54that this move was extra-constitutional.
30:00In Moscow, confused and concerned, people began to gather at the Russian Parliament
30:05building, the White House.
30:07No one knew where or how Gorbachev was, or what was really happening.
30:15Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev's enemy and rival, defended him and the Constitution.
30:21Yeltsin entered the Parliament building and prepared to resist.
30:48The coup had not succeeded in seizing power outright.
30:53Soldiers were refusing to obey the emergency committee.
30:57Some commanders turned their tanks around.
31:15Anxious crowds grew throughout the day.
31:20On the evening of the 19th, nervously, the plotters held a televised press conference.
31:35They were frightened.
31:37They had shaking hands.
31:41It was clear they didn't know what to do.
31:45At the same time, I felt scared because, God forbid, they should really come to power.
31:50What would happen then?
31:57Gorbachev was unable to contact the outside world.
32:00He recorded this statement to a home video camera.
32:04No one saw it.
32:25As night fell, fears grew that the emergency committee, increasingly desperate, might order
32:31an attack on the White House and its defenders.
32:37We were defending a free Russia, and the symbol of free Russia was Yeltsin.
32:44We joined hands and waited for the tanks in dead silence.
32:56As the armoured vehicles moved among them, three young men were killed.
33:09At three in the morning, Khrushchev called Yeltsin in the White House and admitted defeat.
33:17We were not bloodthirsty.
33:19We were not ready to pay any price to hold on to power.
33:29Yeltsin sent a plane to bring Gorbachev back to Moscow.
33:34He arrived early on August 22nd.
33:48Far more was changed than Gorbachev realised.
34:14Yeltsin was the victor, and was now in command.
34:32The next day, in the Russian Parliament, Yeltsin rammed home his victory.
34:57Humiliated by Yeltsin, and at last realising that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
35:02role was finished, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary.
35:10As talks on the Union continued, Gorbachev, still President of the USSR, was isolated.
35:32At Minsk, on December 8th, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the three Slav states, acted
35:45to dissolve the Soviet Union, and set up instead a Commonwealth of Independent States.
35:52The Soviet Union was finished, and so was Mikhail Gorbachev.
35:58They told George Bush, before telling Gorbachev what they'd done.
36:05It's disgraceful, to tell the President of the United States, and not bother to inform
36:12the President of your own country.
36:14It's shameful, absolutely contemptible.
36:20It's dirty.
36:35For 45 years, the world feared a nuclear apocalypse.
36:41It never came.
36:45Statesmen, on both sides, who had the power to push the nuclear button, in crisis after
36:52crisis, put humanity's interest first.
36:59Nuclear deterrence kept the peace.
37:04The world is a far safer place, now that the Cold War is over.
37:10No leader of a small country is worrying and saying to his cabinet, one of these two
37:16crazy superpowers is going to get us caught up in a nuclear war.
37:21That is not going to happen.
37:25Those of us who experienced what I would call the fever of the Cold War, the permanent state
37:35of alarm about the prospect of a nuclear war, we breathe more easily now.
37:45We no longer have to carry this heavy burden.
37:53The Cold War ended, peaceably.
37:57But need it have begun?
38:00Could it all have been avoided when East and West were comrades back in 1945?
38:10We missed our chance because there were so many suspicions on both sides.
38:20The West exaggerated the strength of the Soviet Union.
38:24We could not possibly have moved into Europe.
38:29We were a devastated country.
38:33We'd lost millions of people.
38:37I can't imagine any circumstances under which we could have gotten along with Uncle Joe Stalin.
38:49I can imagine no circumstances under which we could have worked out our problems with
38:55Russia earlier than we did or in a different way.
39:01I've come to the conclusion we did it pretty goddamn well.
39:09Millions who might have died in nuclear conflict lived and prospered.
39:16But there were costs, human and material, and a price to pay.
39:24The manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons left a continuing mark.
39:31The legacy of the Cold War really means that the Cold War is still going on.
39:37It's going on because the air, water and soil are polluted.
39:43It's very expensive and difficult to overcome this legacy.
39:48It's really a delayed action time bomb.
39:59During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union between them spent trillions
40:05of dollars on armaments.
40:08The United States, borrowing heavily, could afford it.
40:13The Soviet Union, in the end, could not.
40:22Part of that vast cost was necessary to maintain the balance on which world peace depended.
40:29Some of it was wasted.
40:46There were shooting wars within the Cold War.
40:49They took their toll.
40:51In Korea, millions died.
40:59And millions in Vietnam, soldiers and civilians.
41:09Over a million died in Afghanistan.
41:16Hundreds of thousands died in Africa and in Central America.
41:22Some of these wars would have happened anyway.
41:24The Cold War made them more deadly.
41:47Thousands died in a divided Europe.
41:54Two hundred at the Berlin Wall.
42:01The living mourn the dead.
42:21And look, he's right here, where my lips can reach him.
42:27He isn't up high, where I can't reach him, or down low, where I can't bend any more.
42:31He's right here in front of me.
42:51The Cold War was a clash of ideologies.
43:01And the big Cold War loser was Marxism-Leninism.
43:10The communist dream of a better society that would outlast the West came to nothing.
43:17But not for Fidel Castro.
43:21I believe that the ideals of socialism, which are so generous and appeal so much to solidarity
43:27and fraternity, will one day disappear.
43:32What would prevail, selfishness, individualism, personal ambitions?
43:40That will not save the world.
43:45Of that I'm absolutely convinced.
43:54Communism as a system went against life, against man's fundamental needs, against the need
44:02for freedom, the need to be enterprising, to associate freely, against the will of the
44:09nation.
44:11It suppressed national identity.
44:16Something that goes against life may last a long time, but sooner or later it will collapse.
44:28The superpowers had confronted each other relentlessly.
44:31Now, under intolerable pressure, one side withdrew.
44:41Gorbachev had done as much as anyone to end the Cold War.
44:45He called Bush and told him this was his last day in office.
44:49There was a kind of sadness.
44:53The finality of it hit me pretty hard, and it was Christmas time and holiday time.
45:00And I felt that a friend was hurt, and I wasn't happy about that.
45:08That night, the red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time.
45:21In Washington, Bush made his Christmas broadcast.
45:25For over 40 years, the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and
45:30the threat it posed to our most precious values.
45:34This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans.
45:38It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction.
45:43That confrontation is now over.