The cold war never ended: twenty years later, historians still can't figure out why the West won.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Culture and Reviews - The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War - Book review

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The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Michael Meyer, New York: Scribner, 272 pages, $26

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, by James Mann, New York: Viking, 416 pages, $27.95

WE DON'T KNOW the exact hierarchy of motives, but it is certain that Chris Gueffroy was willing to leave his family and friends to avoid conscription into the army. Considering the associated risks, it's likely that the 20-year-old was also strongly motivated to escape the stultifying sameness, the needless poverty, the cultural black hole that was his homeland. In his passport photo, he wore a small hoop earring, an act of nonconformity in a country that prized conformity above all else. But Gueffroy's passport was yet another worthless possession, for he had the great misfortune of being born into a walled nation, a country that brutally enforced a ban on travel to "nonfraternal" states.

On February 6, 1989, Gueffroy and a friend attempted to escape from East Berlin by scaling die Mauer--the wall that separated communist east from capitalist west. They didn't make it far. After tripping an alarm, Gueffroy was shot 10 times by border guards and died instantly. His accomplice was shot in the foot but survived, only to be put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison for "attempted illegal border-crossing in the first degree."

Twenty years ago this month, and nine months after the murder of Gueffroy, the Berlin Wall, that monument to the barbarism of the Soviet experiment, was finally breached. The countries held captive by Moscow began their long road to economic and cultural recovery, and to reunification with liberal Europe. But in the West, where Cold War divisions defined politics and society for 40 years, the moment was not greeted as a welcome opportunity for intellectual reconciliation, for fact-checking decades of exaggerations and misperceptions. Instead, then as now, despite the overwhelming volume of new data and the exhilaration of hundreds of millions finding freedom, the battle to control the Cold War narrative raged on unabated. Reagan haters and Reagan hagiographers, Sovietophiles and anti-communists, isolationists and Atlanticists, digested this massive moment in history, then carried on as if nothing much had changed. A new flurry of books timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of communism's collapse reinforces the point that the Cold War will never truly be settled by the side that won.

It is bizarre to revisit pre-1989 journalism and punditry on Soviet communism. The suffering of the bit players, those pitiable citizens stranded behind the Iron Curtain, was largely ignored in favor of larger political goals. If Ronald Reagan believed the Kremlin to be the beating heart of an "evil empire," many of his angriest critics believed, then Moscow couldn't be all bad. Writing in The Nation in 1984, historian Stephen F. Cohen hissed that, in a perfect world, "fairness would not allow us to defame a nation that has suffered and achieved so much."

Although uniformly anti-Soviet, some conservatives too were guilty of a Cold War-induced moral blindness, defending authoritarian governments in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Iberia as bulwarks against communist expansion. Columnist Pat Buchanan celebrated the authoritarian leaders Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Francisco Franco of Spain as "soldier-patriots" and referred quaintly to the racist regime in South Africa as the "Boer Republic." Others accused America's most anti-Soviet president of impuissance. As early as 1983, neo-conservative writer Norman Podhoretz proclaimed that Reagan's policies toward the Soviet Union amounted to "appeasement by any other name."

When the whole rotten experiment suddenly failed, eventually bringing to an end not just Moscow's Warsaw Pact client governments but the proxy civil wars it fought in the Third World, instead of engaging in overdue self-criticism many commentators clung to shopworn shibboleths. In 1990 the academic Peter Marcuse, also writing in The Nation, bizarrely claimed that East Germany "had never sent dissidents to gulags and rarely to jail" and expressed outrage that the "goal of the German authorities is the simple integration of East into West without reflection," instead of heeding the pleas of the intellectual class who were at work on a more humane, less Russian brand of socialism.

The weeks and months following the fall of the Wall saw...