25a: Weird Scenes Inside the Curtain

On August 13, 1961, as a month-old baby boy snoozed contentedly in Racine, Wisconsin, the East German government started work on the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall eventually grew to be nine feet tall, covered with barbed wire, searchlights and guns, and guarded by elite policemen. It was not constructed to keep envious West Berliners out of the socialist paradise known as East Germany. Rather, it was intended to keep East Germans and other Soviet bloc inhabitants from trickling into West Berlin and, from there, to freedom. West Berliners were isolated. The West was suitably outraged. President Kennedy himself appeared in Berlin to declare himself a Berliner. But in effect the wall did Communism more harm than good. More than anything else, the Wall symbolized the moral bankruptcy and outright tyranny prevailing in the Soviet Union and its client states. When the Wall came down in 1989, it was a clear sign of the end for the USSR - which would only survive the Wall by two years.

In segment 25b: Homo Sovieticus, we encounter the homo Sovieticus, or "Soviet Man" which, it was fondly believed, Communism would ultimately produce. In fact, years of deprivation and propaganda and anti-intellectualism had made the Soviet populace too apathetic even for cynicism. Russian science, once the envy of all Europe, had been devoted to strictly military purposes for so long that the intelligentsia had basically gone into hibernation. That is, the lucky ones who avoided the GULag and the psychiatric hospitals.

In segment 25c: Gerontocracy, we trace the era of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, a man whose bluff, pleasant personality disguised a tiny, alcohol-sodden brain. A perfect nonentity, he did what he could to let the Soviet Union slip down into a morass of apathetic despair. Brezhnev was not, as some believed, always old.  He was in his late fifties when Khrushchev was deposed in 1964. His handling of the Czechoslovakian "Prague Spring" of 1968 was vigorous. But eventually exemplified the notion of "gerontocracy" - rule by extremely old men. He was likely already senile when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979; his aged successors Andropov and Chernenko were unable to extricate the troops or make any other major mark on the fast declining Soviet state.

Segment 25d: Fall of the Soviet Empire gives us the end of the USSR as we knew it. It fell apart. The republics all ultimately seceded, using a right granted them by none other than Lenin himself when the Soviet Union was founded. Isn't it ironic? In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev inherited a regime with a stagnant economy, massive and expensive military commitments, a corrupt and top-heavy bureaucracy, and a populace that no longer cared about anything. By introducing perestroika, or restructuring to the economy, and glasnost, or openness, to political life, Gorbachev hoped to jolt the Soviet Union back on the path toward Communism. It didn't work.