Most history books and articles increasingly tell a standard story about the fall of the Berlin Wall: the Soviet Union could no longer economically and militarily handle competition with the West, and brand-new Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to initiate a policy of glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring) in the mid-1980s. Together with Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev agreed to abolish a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe (the 1987 INF Treaty), and once the citizens of the Warsaw Pact countries received a little freedom, the fall of the Wall quickly followed, and with it the collapse of the communist system.
This vision of the events of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War is too narrow and merits several important additions.
The contributions of citizens
First of all, the calls for nuclear disarmament grew stronger in the 1970s. In order to curb the mass protest against new nuclear weapons in Europe, in a famous 1979 ‘double-track decision’, NATO intentionally added a negotiation component to the decision to deploy 572 new nuclear weapons in European NATO member states. Nevertheless, resistance to the nuclear arms race continued.
