On November 9th, the world will celebrate twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which signalled the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. No doubt leaders will congratulate themselves on the triumph of democracy, freedom and liberal values. However, the documents Pavel has produced tell a different story, one where Thatcher states it is not in the interests of Britain for Germany to re-unify, and where the Soviets discuss pulling down the wall themselves.

A few exceptions aside, the Kremlin’s secret archives are still classified, and under state control. However, some unauthorised copies found their way into the private Gorbachev Foundation. A selection of these were made public in 2000 and Pavel spent three years collecting over a thousand documents, some classified, some not. He fled to Britain shortly after access to the archives was yet further restricted.

What are arguably most shocking are the records of correspondence between Thatcher and Gorbachev. Mr Kohl, Chancellor of West Germany at the time, has already written in his memoirs of Thatcher’s resistance to German unification – contrary to her public pronouncements – and these documents appear to support that. In a transcript of a conversation between Thatcher and Gorbachev in September 1989, Thatcher starts by telling Gorbachev she was ‘deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski’, the leader of the Communist Party in Poland. Therefore, already courting controversy among Solidarity supporters in Poland and the West, she goes on to ask Gorbachev if she may speak with him in confidence and for the rest of the conversation not to be recorded. The records of the rest of the conversation are ‘reproduced from memory’.

In the following exchange Thatcher tells Gorbachev that the ‘reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe’, before firmly stating: “We do not want a unified Germany”. German unification had been an official goal of Western policy for more than a generation, with regular pronouncements to that end.

However, Thatcher tells Gorbachev not to listen to Nato communiqués and argues that the changes in the post-war borders could not be allowed as it would ‘undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security’.
She goes on to say that the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact and the destabilization of Germany are “not in our interests” and even states that the President of the United States sent her a telegram which asked her to directly tell Gorbachev that the “United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or be perceived by Soviet society as  a danger”.

The same sentiments were echoed by James Attali, the personal adviser to French President Mitterrand, when he met with Vadim Zagladin, a senior aide to Gorbachev, in Kiev a month after the wall came down. He said that that Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany had “puzzled the French leadership” and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.” He then stated bluntly, echoing Mrs Thatcher, that: “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable.”

Even President George Bush Snr, expressed the same assurances and concerns. In a conversation between himself and Gorbachev in Malta, December 1989, Bush said that “Kohl knows that some Western allies, whilst publicly supporting re-unification given that is the will of the German people, are actually concerned about it.”

He goes on to reassure Gorbachev that the West will not threaten the Soviet Union and not to take Kohl’s public statements seriously. He tells him that: ‘We will not do anything rash in order to speed up the question of re-unification. If you speak to Kohl, you will see that he agrees with my approach and if some of his public statements do not always confirm this, that is due to the peculiarities of his political system, as well as the emotional side.”

The documents also show the confusion of the Kremlin in face of riots across Eastern Europe and the flight of thousands of East Germans to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Although East Germany was vital to Soviet interests, Gorbachev was determined not to send in troops. There is even a transcript of a Politburo discussion in the Kremlin on November 3, 1989, six days before the Wall came down, in which Eduard Shevardnadze, the Foreign Minister suggests that “We’d better take down the wall ourselves”.

In response, Gorbachev says that this will cause problems for East Germany, which will be bought up, before going on to say: “The West doesn’t want German reunification but wants to use us to prevent it, to cause a clash between us and the FRG [Western Germany] so as to rule out the possibility of a future ‘conspiracy’ between the USSR and Germany.”  

A few documents from the Gorbachev Foundation were published in the ‘Kremlin Minutes’ in 2006, but these do not contain many of the
documents outlined above.

What these unique documents show is that, far from the Western Leaders pushing for the end of the Soviet Union, they were content to leave the status-quo unchallenged: not only were they not responsible for the fall of the wall, they actively worked against it. The fall of the Berlin Wall, therefore, was not produced by the West, but by the millions of East Berliners who took to the streets to take down the wall. What could leaders do except go along with it?

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