1987: "Tear down this wall!" Twenty years ago, President Reagan challenged the Soviet Union to end its domination of Eastern Europe and bring an end to the Cold War.

• Author: Whitney, Craig R.
• Position: TIMES PAST - Era overview

The gymnasium of my Massachusetts high school in the 1950s was sunk below ground level, and the building had a sign--a circle with three yellow and three black triangles. That marked it as the shelter we were to go to in case of an atom bomb attack by the Soviet Union (or "Russia," as we always called it), whose Communist rulers seemed bent on global confrontation with the United States.

Both countries spent untold sums on colossal stockpiles of nuclear weapons over a 40-year period that began in the late 1940s. Historians call it the "Cold War" because it never turned hot. If it ever had, leaders of both countries knew that millions could have perished in a nuclear holocaust.

It was a long, nerve-wracking standoff. But on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan went to the Berlin Wall--the most potent symbol of the Cold War--and challenged his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, to change every thing. And within a few years, it had.

Berlin had been a flashpoint since the end of World War II in 1945, when Soviet and American armies met in Germany after destroying the war machine Adolf Hitler used to build the Third Reich and take over most of Europe.

FOCUS ON BERLIN

Berlin, along with the rest of eastern Germany, was behind Soviet lines when the fighting stopped in May. But the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, had agreed to give occupation rights in the western part of Berlin to his wartime allies, the United States and Britain. (France got its sector a bit later.)

Wartime solidarity quickly cooled, however, as the Soviets installed Communist regimes in most of the Eastern European nations it occupied at the end of the war. President Harry S. Truman concluded that without help from the U.S., Western Europe would collapse economically and fall into Communist hands. The U.S. responded with a massive aid program known as the Marshall Plan to jump-start the economies of Western Europe and help them rebuild (see timeline, p. 22-23).

In 1949, after Stalin tried to starve the Allies out of West Berlin with a blockade, the U.S., Canada, and the Western Europeans formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose members resolved that a Soviet attack on one of them would be considered an attack on all.

Moscow responded by creating the Warsaw Pact, an organization of Eastern European states. East and West Germany became separate countries, with West Berlin an island of freedom 110 miles inside the Communist German Democratic Republic.

West Germany became a successful democracy and a member of NATO. Its prosperity and freedom attracted hundreds of thousands of people escaping from the hardships created by the Communist state-controlled economy in East Germany.

THE WALL RISES

To halt the hemorrhaging, on Aug. 13, 1961, the Soviets and the East Germans began building an insurmountable concrete wall that slashed through the city. East German guards were ordered to shoot anyone trying to flee over the Wall: 250 people were killed in escape attempts in the next three decades.

The Wall divided Berlin, literally and figuratively, running through buildings and separating families, with people climbing street lamps to wave and show off newborn babies to relatives on the other side.

The division extended underground: East Berliners couldn't ride the subway into the West; West Berliners still rode lines that ran through the East, but they needed passports to get off there.

Over the years, the western side of the Wall became a raucous tribute to free speech, with all kinds of graffiti. On the eastern side, buildings were torn down to create an open area with guard towers from which soldiers would shoot anyone who ventured into the "death strip."

GORBACHEV

When...