The fall of the Berlin Wall was not big news in Russia. Neither was it a surprise. It was a logical consequence of the process that began in Moscow in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

By 1989 his perestroika, or reconstruction and opening, was in full swing. Andrei Sakharov, Russia’s most famous dissident and nuclear scientist, returned from his forced exile in Gorky and was elected to the first Soviet parliament. Banned films and books flooded the intellectual space. The physical space also opened up, as Russians started to travel to the West.

The idea of sending tanks to stem velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe was unthinkable. Mr Gorbachev told Communist leaders in Eastern Europe that Moscow would not interfere in their domestic affairs as early as 1985. The leaders did not believe him, or did not want to share the news with their people—for once Soviet soldiers and subsidies were removed, their own days would be numbered.

When Mr Gorbachev visited Prague in 1987, the Czech people asked him to stay. In Tom Stoppard’s recent play, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, Jan, the Czech protagonist, explains to a British reporter: “When Gorbachev and the beautiful Raisa smile and wave, the Czech people go crazy… When we were reformers, the Soviets invaded. Now the Soviets are reformers, they have discovered a deep respect for Czechoslovakia’s right to govern itself.”

Mr Gorbachev had his own “Jan”. His best friend at Moscow State University was Zdenek Mlynar, a young Czech communist who later became a leader of the Prague Spring. (Subsequently he was ejected from the Communist Party and then from the country.) When Mr Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party, Mlynar was one of the few foreigners who knew him well: “We are talking about a man who attributes more importance to his own experience, lived and felt, than to what is decreed on paper.”

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