"You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long." - Boris Yeltsin In 1985 the designer of this course visited divided Berlin, and went through Checkpoint Charlie. Machine guns and Volkspolizei were everywhere, and the Berl
political science
Description
"You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long." - Boris Yeltsin In 1985 the designer of this course visited divided Berlin, and went through Checkpoint Charlie. Machine guns and Volkspolizei were everywhere, and the Berlin on the other side of the Wall was like another planet. Not in a million years did he ever expect to see the Wall come down, but four years later it did - torn down by the people of Berlin, not by any governments or armies. (And then the capitalists took over - click here.) The end of the Soviet Union and its puppet allies was one of the landmark events of the past century. I say "end of the Soviet Union," not "the fall of Communism," because the USSR and its allies - thanks to Joseph Stalin - were never really "communist" in the sense intended by Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin.
