ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to be having a lot of fun in the “new Berlin,” as he basked in the admiration of the West. Most analysts agree that there were several factors that led to the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, but all agree that, without Mikhail Gorbachev, it would never have happened, at least at that time. So, as strange as it first seems that Gorbachev, the man who destroyed the Soviet empire, should go to Berlin to celebrate that event with the historic enemy, in the end it seems less odd. Such an event was one of those that occurred at this week’s twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and, subsequently, the fall of Soviet Communism and the transformation of the world. “If the new Soviet leadership and its new foreign policy had not existed, nothing would have happened,” he told the Nation.
