Freedom Fries

Freedom Fries

I will forever associate the fall of the Berlin Wall with french fries.

In 1989, my wife and I were living and working in Moscow. On November 9, our friend Bob was condo-sitting in the new (buggy) American embassy complex. He invited us over for dinner, and, after navigating through the marine checkpoint, we enjoyed an entrée neither of us can recall, plus a cookie sheet full of freshly-baked frozen french fries, with lots of Heinz ketchup. They tasted like home.

Better still, the condo had a live feed of CNN, which was only available in a few places in Moscow back then. Together, dipping french fries in ketchup, we watched the amazing events unfold in Berlin, astounded at what we were witnessing.

Just a year earlier, Bob and I had been in graduate school together, studying the long and tortuous history of reforms in Russia and its East European vassal states. Huddled around seminar room tables, cranked up on coffee and wise beyond our years after reading widely in low circulation academic journals, we postulated various futures for East Germany, Hungary and the rest of the Soviet Empire. We talked of liberalization, revanche, social compacts, and economic versus political reform. But, like the rest of the world, none of us foresaw that the Empire would suddenly and unexpectedly collapse in a whimper after top-down reforms spun out of control.

Brought up in a bipolar world populated by John le Carré spy novels, the Red Menace, megaton warheads and strategies of containment, we could not see that our world was built not of concrete and steel, but of tissue paper and balsa wood. We certainly knew there were things wrong with the world, but we expected cosmetic reforms, implemented slowly. History had other plans.

When things did collapse, we were in the thick of it in Moscow. It was exciting, exhilarating, endlessly interesting. But of course, as expats, we were insulated from the worst aftershocks. The collapse of the Soviet Empire and economy brought more than a decade of human suffering to Eastern Europe and the former USSR, on a scale that dwarfs the current U.S. economic crisis. And while we have witnessed some terrible things over the last 20 years (strikes, Chechnya, devaluation, terrorism, privatization, oligarchs and coups), it always seems rather amazing to me that we have not witnessed worse, that, with the notably horrific exception of Yugoslavia, the 1989 revolutions were essentially peaceful.

At the same time, I can’t help wondering what it would be like to travel back in time to one of those seminar rooms in 1988 and calmly inform the students that, over the next two decades, the Soviet Union would cast off its communist husk and evolve into 15 mostly democratic, vigorously capitalist states; that Russia would become a member of the group of leading industrialized states; that Russians would travel the world freely; that Russian literature and art would be unshackled; that nuclear arms would be reduced to one-third their current level; and that the Berlin Wall would turn out to be made not of concrete and steel, but tissue paper and balsa wood.

Not a single one of them, myself included, would believe me.

Enjoy the issue.