ABSTRACT
7 October 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev is in East Berlin to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the “German Democratic Republic” (a historical misnomer, neither German nor democratic nor a republic, but really just what the West Germans have always called it, the “Soviet Occupation Zone”). He has flown in from Moscow with a message that the East German Communists, challenged by the increasing number of their subjects fleeing to the West, prefer not to hear. East Germany has, as he puts it to the assemblage of Western journalists, “the capacity to learn from life and when it is necessary, to make the corrections that it requires…and base their policy on the realities.” 1
