When the Iron Curtain Fell

I was born and grew up in the west in the cold war period. The threat of nuclear war from Russia was something that worked its way into stories, films and even discussion in our day to day lives. I was fairly young, so in all honesty I didn't feel any real fear of it becoming reality and it probably helped that TV viewing was generally curbed in our house. The biggest reality for me with regards the USSR was the fact that part of my grandmother's family lived behind the Berlin wall in East Germany, so I grew up knowing that there were places in the world where people couldn't easily leave their own country.

I didn't hear about it often, but little stories and events would happen which over time built up a picture. When I was young my great grandmother and great aunts came over from Germany to visit us. I didn't understand why at the time, but this was an incredibly special event. My great grandmother and one of the aunts lived in East Germany and I actually only recently learnt that they didn't have permission back then to travel to England. They'd gotten permission to visit West Germany and my other great aunt had snuck them out from there to visit the family they'd never been able to meet before.

In November 1989, when I was in my early teens, fantastic news was played all across the west that Germany was to be reunified and the Berlin wall was coming down. For all intents and purposes it was an amazing event which marked the end of the cold war and freedom for all those countries that had lived under Soviet rule since the end of the second world war. Pieces of the Berlin wall were being auctioned off for small fortunes as people vied for a piece of this history changing event.

Between 1988 and 1991 the Soviet Union was disbanded and many countries transitioned to independence. We all moved on with our lives and apart from reading or hearing about how terrible it was under Soviet rule, I heard little more about it for years, until I came to Australia and met a Ukrainian woman who lived through this event as an adult.

I'm not sure what prompted it, possibly a comment from a rather forward and naive Aussie woman, but the Ukrainian woman started to tell us about the realities of perestroika (restructuring) for many Ukrainians when it happened. Her English was good, but probably not fluent enough for intricacies, so what she managed to get across to us was that when perestroika happened, the new government needed money to pay for this new government, because Russia had left with everything. So they proceeded to take that money from the bank accounts of the people. This left many destitute and in some cases homeless. There were people who had just sold their home and before they could use that money to buy their new home, it was taken from them by their government. There were many people who went into the forests and shot themselves, so it seems suicide was rife.

I've been trying to find some confirmation of this, but my searches aren't really coming up with anything detailed, just overviews of the official history. I did find this small paragraph in a write up on the Soviet Union from 1953:

When the Russian Communists left, they took with them all the cash, the savings and retirement monies that were in the banks for the seniors. There is no investment capital, the economy is not working, and the people are slaves to poverty, but they had hope.

This certainly seems to confirm what this woman was telling us.

As I chatted with my sister about this revelation some time later, she told me about what her East German friend had told her about life in Berlin after the fall of the wall.

The reality of the people until this point was a poor, but community oriented lifestyle with guaranteed employment. When the wall fell, companies were privatised and many disappeared. What we in the west heard about was that West German companies were investing in the East. What they were actually doing was buying up factories and real estate, then asset stripping them and taking the money back to the west. Housing was refurbished and rebuilt, then the rents were brought in line with the west. The many unemployed Easterners sought jobs in western companies, but they were paid the equivalent of what they used to earn before the reunification, which was much less than their western counterparts were earning and it would struggle to cover the newly risen rental costs.

It was apparently not uncommon for people living in high rises to see bodies falling past their window as their buildings were utilised for suicide.

This woman's experience was of Berlin, which, despite being in the middle of East Germany, was also occupied by the west. In this article Sabine Rennefanz gives some insight into experiences in the rest of East Germany. It seems that to this day Germany is still not as united as we'd like to think, but hopefully discussion is now starting to happen so that the divide doesn't continue to deepen.

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Hearing experiences like these, directly from those who experienced them has made me start to realise exactly how much propaganda can extend into all our countries, not just those that are communist or under dictatorship. It also makes me realise that solutions on a large scale are never straight forward, someone will always lose out. Yet our history books don't really cover those aspects. Nothing is black and white, no matter how much we try to make it so.

Interestingly, that same Ukrainian woman who told me her experiences of perestroika offered some insights into the Ukraine situation when infighting first broke out in 2014, but that's another story, so I'll leave things there before I start rambling.



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Whoever is directly controlling the V2K told me to kill myself.
They told me if I killed myself now it would save the lives of countless others.
Saying the longer I wait to kill myself the more people will suffer.


They are reckless and should have shown the proper media what they had before taking me hostage for 5 years. I know there are many in prison that dont deserve to be there because of this. Your stay in prison will not be fun @battleaxe and friends. People are going to want you dead when they find out what you did. I hope you die a slow painful death. You sick mother fuckers.

https://peakd.com/gangstalking/@acousticpulses/electronic-terrorism-and-gaslighting--if-you-downvote-this-post-you-are-part-of-the-problem

Its a terrorist act on American soil while some say its not real or Im a mental case. Many know its real. This is an ignored detrimental to humanity domestic and foreign threat. Ask informed soldiers in the American military what their oath is and tell them about the day you asked me why. Nobody has I guess. Maybe someone told ill informed soldiers they cant protect America from military leaders in control with ill intent. How do we protect locked up soldiers from telling the truth?
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How awful @minismallholding! I cannot begin to imagine the desperation of the people when everything was taken from them, and they had absolutely no control over it! There must be many such stories, but they still hide the truth.
Thank you for sharing this interesting and relevant especially right now, history here with us!
How can people be so cruel?

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After reading the article by Sabine Rennefanz I realise that often those affected by these thing don't end up speaking up either, so there is a cycle that keeps things hidden. I guess when there is a majority that seems to be saying one thing, people fear retaliation for going against that narrative. It's only when people tell their stories they start to realise that they aren't really a minority after all.

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Yet our history books don't really cover those aspects. Nothing is black and white, no matter how much we try to make it so.

I totally agree with this point.
No report of history can be 100% accurate especially when it's reported by different people who understand things differently and ofcourse relate things their own way.
So, yes... Nothing is exactly black and white!

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They do say the winners write history. I guess we also tend to just make a blanket assessment with teaching history and unless we delve into it in detail, we won't see all that happened, the good and the bad.

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History is a very wide subject. On our own, we can make extensive research but in teaching history... it's always about the general knowledge.

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We must be a similar age @minismallholding. I remember our art class being commissioned to paint murals on the school hallways. We had to do it in categories according to eac decade. Part of the 80's mural was my interpretation of the Berlin wall coming down. That and the royal wedding! But how much do teenagers actually grasp of the faraway tragedies or triumphs?

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I almost actually have my precise age away when I wrote about the wall, but decided I didn't need to share that much. 😜😆

Do the royals have impact in South Africa? I'm often surprised at how much interest the wider world takes in the British royal family. Maybe because I have little interest in them myself any more. Princess Dy was the only one who ever really caught my attention, and maybe Fergie because we have the same hair colour. 😁

The mural sounds like it was fun. I wonder if it's still up on the walls today.

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Why does government hide the bitter truth even from her citizens? To what end? I can't even imagine what happened to people whose money was taken from them. What I don't understand is if it was just a rash decision by the government or there was any dialogue between the government and her citizens before the decision was taken.

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How often is there ever any dialogue between government and citizens before decisions are made? With the Ukraine, they still seemed to be a fairly communist government initially as well, so probably no dialogue. I'm guessing that for the East Germans, who were used to communist ways, they wouldn't have even felt that they could speak up.

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