412 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
saving. He did not intend to save the Wall. His aim was to manage the
East German crisis quietly.
Krenz’s Politburo were beginning to panic when news reached
them on 9 November that groups of East Germans might be about to
try and breach the Wall. Kohl and Wałęsa talked on the same day
about the crisis in East Berlin, but Wałęsa’s chief concern at the time
was about how to keep Poland at the centre of the world’s attention.^69
This was also Shevardnadze’s preoccupation in discussions inside his
ministry.^70 Krenz telegrammed Moscow for guidance on the situation.
His own officials were in a quandary and one of them gave a TV inter-
view implying that the authorities were resigned to the idea of free
passage between the two halves of Berlin. Krenz had made no such
decision, but took no practical precautions. East Berliners in their
thousands took this as permission to take matters into their own
hands. By the evening they had massed at the Wall and begun to chip
away at the concrete. Its guards had no orders to stop them and it was
not long before they had made breaches and started to walk through
to the West. Joyous celebrations occurred on both sides of a city that
popular action was starting to reunify.
Kohl’s joy knew no bounds and he called Bush next day to say:
‘I’ve just arrived from Berlin. It is like witnessing an enormous fair.
It has the atmosphere of a festival.’^71 Gorbachëv wanted everybody
to be clear about the USSR’s policy. He wrote immediately to Bush,
Kohl, Thatcher and Mitterrand emphasizing his commitment to the
exist ence of two German states. On 11 November he phoned Kohl
and called for the USSR, West Germany and East Germany to keep
in contact.^72 Three days later he rang Mitterrand to say that Kohl had
claimed to be opposing those in West Germany calling for reunifi-
cation.^73
Although the Soviet leaders were shaken by revolutions that they
had failed to anticipate, they searched for reasons to be confident.
Critics had been buffeting Gorbachëv about his tactics in the arms
reduction talks. The danger for him now was that they would make the
additional objection that he had needlessly lost Eastern Europe – or at
least was in the process of losing it. On 18 November Shevardnadze
held an overdue discussion with his aides on the German question. If
East Germany could keep going, he contended, the entire ‘common-
wealth’ – by which he meant the Warsaw Pact – could endure. The
reunification of Germany in his view would enable the economic inte-
gration of Europe as a whole; and he could not see how the Americans