Former President George Bush says in the documentary that the United States did not want to make a mistake that could turn the course of events. He adds that only later did Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev reveal that he had no idea what would have happened had the U.S. overreacted. Bush noted that there were masses of Soviet soldiers in the former East German and all over Eastern Europe and the U.S. did not want to see a repeat of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Gorbachev recalls in the documentary how he met with all of the party heads from the East Bloc in Moscow in March of 1989. "I told them, 'We are about to see great changes. As for that which concerns our country, we will start the changes. As for that which concerns your countries, we will not interfere with your affairs.'", he says. "I don't think they believed me," he adds.
Miklós Németh, Hungary's prime minister at the time, describes in the documentary how the Hungarian government tested Moscow step by step, week by week, starting by scrapping the mandatory study of Russian in the schools. When there was no reaction from the Soviets, they took further steps.
The documentary also features interviews with border guards who allowed hundreds of East Germans to cross Hungary's border with Austria unheeded during the Pan-European Picnic, an event, on August 19, 1989, that was a forerunner to the fall of the iron curtain.
"The most compelling part of the story comes from the average people we hear from: the startled and confused border guards, the ordinary citizens who literally 'made a break for it' during a simple picnic, and those who flooded the embassies in Budapest and Prague, stared down the Cold War reality and realized the impossible," CNN says of the documentary.
Source: Múlt-kor
