The Superpowers

A Soviet rocket being paraded past portraits of Lenin, Marx and Engels through Red Square in Moscow to celebrate May Day in 1963

Photograph from Associated Press

the berlin wall

august 31, 1962 | Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff

For those who had survived World War II, it was hard to imagine. But the troops were hardly home before it became clear that the contest between the victors in the fight against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan would have even higher stakes than the war itself. Two superpowers emerged in Washington and Moscow, with greater military strength and global reach than any powers before them. From the Americas to Europe, from Africa to Asia, the foundations of human society and the very existence of mankind would ultimately be in play.

At first it seemed the Cold War might be just a contest of ideas, a competition over the best way to constitute government. Among those who had been persecuted by the fascists—and had made enormous sacrifices to defeat them—were the followers of the 19th century political philosopher Karl Marx, who had predicted the ultimate demise of capitalism in favor of a communist pooling of property, labor and social goods. Variants emerged everywhere, with different degrees of totalitarian control over political and economic power, but eventually they were led by Joseph Stalin’s mighty, genocidal Soviet Union.

On the other side were the adherents of the political and economic liberalism that had grown out of the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Here too there were variations in constitutional structures: some, like France and Sweden, embraced a degree of socialist state control over the economy, and ­several retained, then ultimately relinquished, vast colonial dictatorships. But most Western democracies rallied behind the leadership of the strongest and most stable of World War II’s victors, the U.S.

Strategically, the stakes were anything but theoretical. World War II had driven a technological revolution in warmaking, fueling the invention of fission and fusion bombs that could kill on a previously unimaginable scale. Once Moscow emerged as a nuclear power, the two sides began an arms race to gain strategic advantage and carved up the global map into spheres of influence that could determine the results of the competition through control of geography, people and resources. The physical symbol of this division was the Berlin Wall, which separated the Western enclave of the city from the Communist-ruled part of Germany. As TIME described it, “Seldom in history have blocks and mortar been so malevolently employed or so richly hated in return.” With both sides armed to the teeth and facing each other across contested borders worldwide, the real possibility of an apocalyptic, nuclear World War III became clear to people everywhere.

Facing annihilation or subjugation, the Cold War contestants occasionally risked turning it hot. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, overt and covert proxy wars in the West’s former colonies took tens of thousands of lives. Militarily, the wars between right- and left-wing forces in Korea and Vietnam weakened the U.S.; the post-invasion insurgency in Afghanistan contributed to the Soviet Union’s terminal decline.

As each side sought advantage over the other, vast spying networks and perceived threats emerged at home. TIME itself became involved in a prominent case when one of its best writers, Whittaker Chambers, admitted to being a former communist spy and identified a diplomat, Alger Hiss, as a co-conspirator—a charge Hiss denied to his death.

TIME emerged from World War II as influential, in its way, as the country it called home. In capitals around the world, the TIME bureau was said to be second only to the U.S. embassy in influence. That was partly because of the breadth of the magazine’s readership and its nearly unique access to the individuals at the heights of power. But it was also because, somewhat audaciously, TIME presumed to be the voice of the new power that bestrode the world.

So when in 1948 TIME declared George Marshall, the archi­tect of the West’s postwar resurgence, Man of the Year, we began by declaring America’s arrival as a superpower. “It was in 1947,” we wrote, “that the U.S. people, not quite realizing the full import of their act, perhaps not yet mature enough to accept all its responsibilities, took upon their shoulders the leadership of the world.” Then, two months later, on the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, it put Marx on the cover and suggested he was the leading contender for our Man of the 20th Century, making clear that we recognized that the looming Cold War contest might be close. Against those “who rule Russia and all Communist parties throughout the world,” TIME wrote, “stands capitalist democracy, which has certainly not fulfilled the shiny, steam-driven dreams of some of its early prophets.”

As the contest continued, TIME became less equivocal in its embrace of America’s message to the world but remained the definitive arbiter of events as the contest played out, from the arms race and spy scandals at home and abroad to the proxy wars in Asia and Latin America and the diplomatic maneuvering as China became a nascent superpower. TIME chronicled what would prove to be the sources of the West’s ultimate victory against Communism: superior alliances and diplomatic strategies; open political and economic competition, which seemed undisciplined or fractious but proved resilient and efficient over the long term; and the foundational insight that individual liberty, modestly constrained, is better at delivering for the common good than the totalitarian pooling of people’s interests. —massimo calabresi

George Marshall

January 5, 1948

Portrait by Ernest Hamlin Baker

Recognizing the strategic importance of the Secretary of State’s plan to resurrect the war-ravaged countries of Europe, time linked the retired general to the U.S.’s new leadership role in the world.

On June 5 [1947], standing under the elms in the Harvard Yard, George Marshall, in almost casual terms, announced the beginning of the program that was to become the Marshall Plan. Then & there the U.S. at last set out to seize the initiative from Russia in the cold war ... To a growing sense of realism in U.S. foreign policy, the speech added a much-needed note of resolution: “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion ... We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples ... against aggressive movements that seek to impose on them totalitarian regimes ...”

Whatever the rewards world leadership might return in the long run, they would not be reaped until the hold of want and oppression on the world’s throat was broken. The country’s decision to break it was the vastest gamble in peacetime history. George Marshall’s estimate—“calculated risk”—meant in soldier’s language that it could be won, if all went well, if the most powerful nation in the world threw all its physical and moral strength into the fight. —duncan norton-taylor

Karl Marx

February 23, 1948

Portrait by Ernest Hamlin Baker

The lasting power of Marxism and the spreading challenge it posed to Western democracy were treated with respect and thoughtful analysis in the early days of the Cold War.

Barring the unlikely appearance, before 2000, of an extraordinarily effective saint or major prophet, the Man of the Century will be a German intellectual, devoted to children, caviar and Aeschylus. He does not look the part. His scholarly forehead, his small, sparkling eyes, his massive and majestic beard set him apart from other 20th Century heroes. The black-rimmed eyeglass, which he carries on a thin ribbon around his neck, is a gentle anachronism. Above all, his dates seem wrong. For it was at the height of the Victorian era, when the atom appeared almost as indestructible as Britain’s dominion of the waves, that Karl Heinrich Marx died. But that was a technicality. In the historic sense (as distinguished from the merely biological), Karl Marx has only just begun to live. —henry a. grunwald

Mao Zedong

February 7, 1949

Portrait by Ernest Hamlin Baker

Capturing the extraordinary rise of the charismatic Mao (spelled in time’s previous style), the magazine bemoaned the revolutionary takeover of China but painted a vivid picture of its leader.

U.S. visitors to Yenan described Mao as a heavy-set man (5 ft. 8 in., 200 lbs.) with the humor, the strength and often the manner of a Chinese peasant. He frequently sat with his feet propped on the table, and in warm weather he unceremoniously stripped to the waist. Once, in Yenan in the presence of General Lin Piao, president of the Red Academy, he took off his trousers for comfort while studying a military map. He smokes incessantly and tends his own tobacco patch. In 1938, the Party Central Committee gave him a $5 monthly raise so he could buy more cigarettes. Between noisy puffs, he chews melon seeds or peanuts. Until recently, when his doctors made him slow up, he used to wash down his heavy meals with kaoliang (grain liquor). Since then Mao has become something of a hypochondriac. —henry a. grunwald

G.I. Joe

January 1, 1951

Illustration by Ernest Hamlin Baker

time focused attention on the front lines of the fight against communism in Korea, quoting a British officer on the qualities of the American fighting man.

Your chaps have everything it takes to make great soldiers—intelligence, physique, doggedness and an amazing ability to endure adversity with grace. The thing they lack is proper discipline. They also would be better off with a little more training in the art of retreat. I know they like to say that the American soldier is taught only offensive tactics, but if Korea has proved nothing else it has proved the absolute necessity of knowing how to retreat in order. Your marines know how, but your Army men just don’t. In our time, you know, we were able to make quite a thing of the rearguard action.” —henry a. grunwald

Joe McCarthy

March 8, 1954

Portrait by Ernest Hamlin Baker

With a detailed look at the Senator’s home life, time flaunted its access to Joe McCarthy, the rabble-rousing red baiter—and at who his next victims might be.

By the evening of Thursday, Feb. 25, 1954, Senator Joe McCarthy, after a fortnight of mounting frenzy, had built the smallest of molehills into one of the most devastating political volcanoes that ever poured the lava of conflict and the ash of dismay over Washington. Joe, the stoker, was still disorganized but quick-witted, charging in and out of his Senate office, snatching up telephones, rushing to the Senate floor to answer quorum calls, dictating statements to reporters. As he dashed about, his office staff lost track, believed a rumor that he had emplaned for New York. Then Joe stomped in from the corridor, stuffed a briefcase, said “Come on” to a waiting reporter and hurried out. —henry luce iii

The Hydrogen Bomb

April 12, 1954

time took a scientific approach to the experimental explosion of the first hydrogen bombs, 750 times more powerful than the ones used against Japan.

For four years the hydrogen bomb grew in secret and silence, stirring like a quickened fetus in the guarded laboratories. Few qualified physicists, U.S. or foreign, cared to talk about it. They knew that their science would soon give monstrous birth, but they had been warned to keep quiet. When the pictures of the bomb’s fury hit the public last week, not many laymen remembered that the scientists long ago predicted what was likely to happen ...

Few scientists feel cheerful about the H-bomb. It looks like too ready a tool of destruction. They have only one reassuring opinion. At the present state of the art, they say, there is no chance that even the most monstrous bomb will get out of control, set fire to the ocean’s hydrogen and turn the earth into a short-lived star. The H-bomb’s ingredients must be pure and carefully selected, but the ocean is a mess of many nonreactive elements. Less than one-ninth of it is hydrogen, and the safe kind of hydrogen at that. —louis banks

Fidel Castro

January 26, 1959

Portrait by Boris Chaliapin

Chronicling the bloody executions that punctuated Castro’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s grotesque regime, time was skeptical any good would result from the uprising. The missile crisis would come in 1962.

Castro showed a natural flair for publicity. Rebel beards, originally grown for lack of shaving gear, gave the revolt a trademark. Astigmatic from birth, Castro was seldom caught with his spectacles on. “A leader does not wear glasses,” he said ... Castro led a revolution against personal government and for restoring a rule of law; since the date of his victory, he has built a government based largely on his personality, while his men have violated his country’s basic law. If he can summon maturity and seriousness, the bloody events of last week may yet turn out to be what Puerto Rico’s Muñoz Marin thinks they are: “A bad thing happening in the midst of a great thing.” If not, the seeds of hate sown in the execution ditches will sprout like the Biblical tares. —richard armstrong

Francis Powers

May 16, 1960

The capture of an American spy pilot alive and of a high-flying spy plane with surveillance films intact was a tactical and propaganda victory for Nikita Khrushchev.

After taking off from his base in Turkey on April 27, said Khrushchev, Powers flew across the southern boundary of the U.S.S.R. to Peshawar in Pakistan. From there, on May 1, he took off on a reconnaissance flight that was supposed to take him up the Ural Mountains to Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula to a landing in Norway. Soviet radar tracked him all the way, and over Sverdlovsk, on Khrushchev’s personal order, he was shot down at 65,000 ft. by a Soviet ground-to-air rocket. Pilot Powers, said Khrushchev, declined to fire his ejection seat because that would have blown up his plane, its instrumentation and possibly Powers himself. Instead, he climbed out of his cockpit, parachuted to earth and was captured, while his plane crashed near by.

Khrushchev spared no cloak-and-dagger touches. He brandished what he called a poisoned suicide needle that Powers was supposed to use to kill himself to avoid capture. Said Khrushchev: Powers refused to use it—“Everything alive wants to live” ... Khrushchev waxed in sarcasm as he reported that Powers had carried a conglomeration of French francs, Italian lire and Russian rubles, plus two gold watches and seven gold rings. “What was he going to do?” asked Khrushchev scornfully. “Fly to Mars and seduce Martian women?”

Nikita Khrushchev

September 8, 1961

Photographs by Carl Mydans and J.R. Eyerman

Khrushchev had vowed not to resume unilateral nuclear testing. But he did, blaming NATO for its aggressive policies toward the Soviets, destroying any hopes that John Kennedy had for test-ban talks.

Conceivably, the Russians may have made a major technological breakthrough on some new nuclear device that is so important that testing outweighs all other factors; some American scientists feel that with luck, hard work and unlimited testing, the U.S. could develop within five years the first crude version of a neutron bomb, which would kill by neutrons but leave buildings more or less unharmed. Khrushchev recently warned U.S.’s John McCloy, President Kennedy’s adviser on disarmament, that the Russians were working on the neutron-bomb idea themselves.

What kind of a bomb did Moscow explode last week? There were few clues. In fact, Moscow was not even admitting that an explosion had occurred. It was Washington that detected the test, on its secret worldwide network of nuclear observation posts. From the White House came a terse statement of the bare known facts:

“The Soviet Union today has conducted a nuclear test in the general area of Semipalatinsk in Central Asia. The device tested had a substantial yield in the intermediate range. It was detonated in the atmosphere.” —edward hughes

William Westmoreland

February 19, 1965

Portrait by Boris Chaliapin

With continuing Viet Cong attacks and apprehension that China would enter the conflict, the commander of American forces in Vietnam pondered the U.S.’s counterinsurgency strategy.

Westmoreland remains an optimist. “I think the job can be done,” he says. “In no manner do I underestimate the magnitude of the problem, but I am realistically hopeful that we can move out in a successful way.” How long will it take? Warns Westmoreland: “It could be a long, drawn-out campaign. In Malaya it took twelve years.”

Sometimes even twelve months seems an impossibly long time for the Americans involved in the dirty jungle war. For the 10,000 or so who lived in Saigon before the dependents moved out ... there were ... roomy villas with two or three servants, broad tree-lined boulevards and a delightfully Gallic tang to the city.

But the life had a darker side. At the American Community School, pupils were told not to put their hands in their desks without checking first for booby traps, and those roomy villas were often ringed with barbed wire to ward off terrorists. A year ago, five Americans died, 100 were wounded in a week when the Viet Cong bombed a ballpark and a movie house.

For those further afield, the comforts are fewer, the dangers greater. Amoebic dysentery is endemic. Few amusements are available. Four U.S. soldiers went on a fishing trip near Quinhon last month, were later discovered murdered; three had been weighted with rocks and dumped in watery graves. —ronald p. kriss

Ho Chi Minh

July 16, 1965

Portrait by Boris Artzybasheff

Facing off against Westmoreland was North Vietnam’s leader, who had already outlasted the French and the Japanese. He died in 1969, six years before the fall of Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh City.

Hanoi last week was ready for total war. So was Ho Chi Minh, the goat-bearded god of Vietnamese Communism and, at 75, Asia’s oldest, canniest Red leader. North Viet Nam’s Ho was making his last and most steely stand, and his young country seemed ready to win or die with him. Since February, U.S. air strikes into North Viet Nam have pounded Ho steadily: in more than 4,050 sorties, jets and prop bombers have razed at least 30 military bases, knocked out 127 antiaircraft batteries, shattered 34 bridges. In their wake the planes left ablaze 17 destroyed truck convoys and an equal number of weapons-carrying trains, along with 20 radar stations, 33 naval craft and the entire Dong Hoi airbase. Yet even as the bomb line crumped closer to crowded Hanoi, there was no sign of Ho’s flinching ... What makes kindly old “Uncle Ho” so hard-nosed? What is it that sends the men from Uncle (some 6,000 or more this year alone) southward as insurgents against an enemy that could crush Hanoi in an instant? More than anything, it is a sense of confidence in methods that have worked splendidly in the past. Ho, after all, has been riding a winning streak for 20 years ... He now believes that the same techniques will work against the U.S.—not only in South Viet Nam but in all of Southeast Asia. —robert f. jones

Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division in Lai Khe wait for a helicopter squadron to move out against Viet Cong positions in 1965

Photograph by Dirck Halstead

American POWs in Asia

December 7, 1970

Photo-illustration by Fred Burrell

After a meticulously planned rescue mission reached a POW camp but found no POWs, the plight of the prisoners and missing grew as a political issue in Washington.

The relatives of the missing and imprisoned have a particularly difficult life because of the nature of the Viet Nam War. Where, in another kind of conflict, their men would be heroes, now antiwar groups in their own land denounce the cause for which the men were fighting in language like that used by the enemy. Crank telephone calls interrupt whatever tranquillity they can find. President Nixon has pronounced himself pleased with their patience, but their patience is wearing thin. Increasingly, some of the wives complain that the U.S. Government is not doing enough. Some of them have been driven to espouse the offer put forward by the Viet Cong’s Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh in Paris last September: that talks on releasing the prisoners would begin when the U.S. agreed to withdrawal within a set period. Says Mrs. Frankie Ford of Orange Park, Fla.: “If it is true that they will not be released until the U.S. gets out, then why don’t they set a date and get out now? This war cannot be successful. Why should one more man die on the battlefield or in the prisons?” —keith r. johnson

Nixon’s China Odyssey

March 6, 1972

Setting up a strategic recalibration of the U.S.-Soviet contest, Nixon made his historic trip to one of America’s most vitriolic enemies, the People’s Republic of China.

The scene in Peking’s Great Hall of the People last week certainly had to be one of history’s great ironies. There, while a Chinese army band played “America, the Beautiful,” a U.S. President merrily clinked mao-tai glasses with his Chinese hosts, long considered the true “baddies” of the Communist world. Nor was it just any American President either; it was a conservative Republican who has long had a reputation as being the perfect cold warrior. The Chinese people must have been deeply startled by the change in their own leaders’ attitudes, but they, after all, live under a system not too distant from 1984’s state-manipulated memory control. Subject to no such constraint, however, the American public could be excused if it found its neck wrenched and its equilibrium upset by the surprising spectacle of Nixon chumming it up with his former enemies and sitting patiently through a revolutionary ballet in Peking ... That the public seemed to have taken it all fairly calmly is due in large part to the fact that in their lifetime most Americans have lived through so many sudden reversals of policy, so many deviations from previously stated principle, so many changes in institutions, that they have come to regard such turnabouts as part of modern life. —edwin g. warner

Deng Xiaoping

January 1, 1979

Portrait by Richard Hess

The diminutive leader (his name was transliterated Teng Hsiao-p’ing until time adopted the pinyin system) started his country on the road that has made it the U.S.’s biggest rival in the 21st century.

The People’s Republic of China, separated so long from the outer world by an instinctive xenophobia and an admixture of reclusive Maoism, in 1978 began its Great Leap Outward, or what Peking’s propagandists call the New Long March. The Chinese, their primitive economy threadbare and their morale exhausted by the years of Mao Tse-tung’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, hope to have arrived by the year 2000 at a state of relative modernity, and become a world economic and military power. They may not arrive, or arrive on time, but their setting off is an extraordinary spectacle of national ambition ... The motive force behind the campaign to get the world’s oldest continuous civilization to the 21st century on schedule is not Mao’s titular successor, Hua Kuo-feng, 57, but Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p’ing ... Tough, abrasive, resilient, Teng, 74, has made more political comebacks than Richard Nixon. Twice, at Mao’s behest, he was purged by his radical enemies, and his last rehabilitation was only 17 months ago. Teng commands a broad power base among the senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army as well as wide support among China’s bureaucrats, technocrats and the intelligentsia. The last two were precisely those elements of Chinese society that, like Teng, were the chief victims of the Cultural Revolution. —lance morrow

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

January 14, 1980

Illustration by Barron Storey

Moscow sent 50,000 troops into Afghanistan to keep Kabul on its side. The resulting quagmire sapped the Soviet empire of its strength and started a chain of events that led to the rise of al-Qaeda.

Fighting the Soviet military machine is a disorganized and leaderless army of insurgents known as mujahidin. They are believed to number 15,000 to 20,000 in summer and as many as 60,000 in winter. Says a U.S. expert: “Winter is the killing season, when there is nothing to do but go out and shoot.” The tribes are hopelessly disunited and fight constantly among themselves. But for the most part they dislike central authority, they distrust foreigners—particularly Russians—and they have fought with rising fervor against the Kabul government ever since the Soviet-backed regime of President [Noor Mohammed] Taraki came to power in April 1978 ... The rebels were doing well until the Soviet takeover. They had virtually surrounded Kabul and controlled as many as 22 of the country’s 28 provinces. Not even armored-car escorts could ensure safe passage for trucks on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar ... Now, at least for the moment, the insurgents are on the run ... [But] others talked as truculently as ever. Said Gul Amir, 36: “The Russians can’t stay in Afghanistan. They are so alien that even the animals hate them.” —burton pines

Lech Walesa

December 29, 1980

Portrait by Leslie Cabarga

The leader of the labor revolt against Poland’s communist leaders would begin the popular unraveling of Soviet rule throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the decade that followed.

Poland poses the gravest threat to the Soviet Union since it forcibly formed the East bloc after World War II. Indeed, events there have, in a sense, stripped the clothes right off the empire. Walesa and his colleagues in the Solidarity leadership know that they are, as it were, condemned to Communism; their basic goal is not to reject the system but to make it work better. Nonetheless, the workers’ revolt shouts out Communism’s ... failures and reminds the world that the glue of Soviet hegemony is force and intimidation ... Says Seweryn Bialer, head of Columbia University’s Research Institute on International Change: “Previous challenges to Soviet control have come from above, from the leaders of satellite nations. The Polish challenge comes from below, from the workers, the only class of which the Soviet Union is afraid.” —stephen smith

Mikhail Gorbachev

September 9, 1985

Photograph by Rudi Frey

The world was still trying to figure out the new Soviet leader when he gave time a 2½-hour interview in Moscow. He would go on to try to reform the empire, only to see it fall apart in 1991.

In assessing Gorbachev, Western Kremlinologists find points of resemblance to [Yuri] Andropov in his stress on economic reform, to [Joseph] Stalin in his insistence on discipline, to [Nikita] Khrushchev in his penchant for press-the-flesh politicking. But the dissimilarities between Gorbachev and his predecessors are greater still: he is a Soviet leader born long after the Bolshevik Revolution, with no adult memories of World War II, no involvement in Stalin’s bloody purges, no strong ties to the Soviet military. Gorbachev is Gorbachev: an authoritarian with a common touch, a convinced Communist and believer in his country’s social and economic system who is nonetheless outspoken in his insistence that the system can and must be made to work better—“a sort of Bolshevik Atari high-tech fan,” in the pithy summary of Alexandre Adler, professor of Russian history at the University of Paris. He is a man with the intellect, political skill and force of personality that might have brought him to the top under any political system. —george j. church

Massacre in Beijing

June 12, 1989

Photograph by Mark Avery

With reporting from correspondents Sandra Burton and Jaime FlorCruz in Beijing, the magazine changed covers on a weekend to chronicle the Chinese government’s hard-line response to dissent.

For seven weeks the world had marveled at the restraint demonstrated by both Beijing’s rulers and the thousands of demonstrators for democracy who had occupied Tiananmen Square. The whole affair, in fact, had developed the aura of a surrealistic ritual, with both sides’ forces stepping in circles as if they were performing some stately, stylized pavane. Violence, it seemed, was out of the question ... By Saturday after­noon, however, the mood changed. At 2 p.m. troops popped tear-gas shells and beat up people trying to stop them from moving into the center of Beijing. An hour later, behind the Great Hall of the People, helmeted soldiers began lashing out at students, bystanders and other citizens who, as if summoned by some irresistible call to the barricades, rushed to the district by the thousands. Soldiers stripped off their belts and used them to whip people; others beat anyone in their path with truncheons, bloodying heads as they tried to pry an opening through the mob. For 51⁄2 hours the students held fast. Then the army inexplicably vanished. Within an hour, off Qianmen West Road on the southern end of the square, 1,200 more troops appeared. Once again they were surrounded by civilians; the soldiers again retreated. But those forays were only the prelude to death. —jesse l. birnbaum and howard chua-eoan

The Breaching of the Berlin Wall

November 20, 1989

Photograph by Chris Niedenthal

The structure that divided a city symbolically divided Europe and the world into ideological camps. Its fall symbolized the breakup of the Soviet bloc, a rebirth of liberty, the end of the Cold War.

For 28 years it had stood as the symbol of the division of Europe and the world, of Communist suppression, of the xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life—the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then—poof!—it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but gone as an effective barrier between East and West, opened in one unthinkable, stunning stroke to people it had kept apart for more than a generation. It was one of those rare times when the tectonic plates of history shift beneath men’s feet, and nothing after is quite the same. What happened in Berlin last week was a combination of the fall of the Bastille and a New Year’s Eve blowout, of revolution and celebration. At the stroke of midnight on Nov. 9, a date that not only Germans would remember, thousands who had gathered on both sides of the Wall let out a roar and started going through it, as well as up and over. West Berliners pulled East Berliners to the top of the barrier along which in years past many an East German had been shot while trying to escape; at times the Wall almost disappeared beneath waves of humanity. —george j. church

Boris Yeltsin

September 2, 1991

Photograph by Robert Wallis

A drunken coup against Gorbachev disintegrated under the heroic public protests led by Yeltsin. But change would prove elusive. Russia is now ruled by the autocratic Vladimir Putin.

They filled the air with old nightmares, throwbacks to a style of history that the world had been forgetting. The Soviet Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a “state of emergency.” They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk, cold war again, and probably Soviet civil war as well. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes? Three days: then the bats of history abruptly turned, flew back and vanished into the past. By act of will and absence of fear, the Russian people accomplished a kind of miracle, the reversal of a thousand years of autocracy ... Until last week the Russian character was judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were the aberration; now we are back to fatal normality. “Every country has the government it deserves,” Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811. Now, after 74 years of communist dictatorship and, centuries before that, of czarist autocracy, the Russians may get a government they have earned—a democracy. —lance morrow

Israelis and Palestinians: Whose Land?

Israel arose as the colonial empires of Europe devolved into new nations thrust into a world polarized by the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the co-existence of the Jewish state and the Arabs with whom it shared what was once the British mandate of Palestine has defied resolution, longer-lived than the enmity of Moscow and Washington. Starting with a war that began on the very day Israel declared its independence in May 1948, it has lasted into the second decade of the 21st century, with missiles lobbed out of Gaza. In TIME’s Aug. 16, 1948, cover story on Israel’s founding Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, the magazine observed, “The Arabs, no less than the Jews, are victims of history. Four centuries of Turkish rule hurt them at least as badly as a decade of Naziism hurt the Jews. Now, in their morning of independence, the Arabs have suffered defeat at the hands of a small, despised people. It rankles ... Yet only in peace between Jews and Arabs is there much hope for either.”

TIME marveled at Israel’s military acumen (on the Six-Day War: “In a few astonishing hours of incredibly accurate bombing and strafing, Israel erased an expensive decade of Russian military aid to the Arab world”) and admired many of the country’s leaders (on Golda Meir: “The essence of the woman is conviction, without compromise, and expressed with all the subtlety of a Centurion tank”). But in Feb. 21, 1983, TIME reported that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had discussions with Lebanese Phalangist leaders, urging them to avenge the assassination of their leader, resulting in the massacre of some 700 Palestinian refugees. After Sharon sued TIME for “blood libel,” the trial revealed that the document at the heart of the allegation did not exist. U.S. libel law and its absence-of-malice clause led to a not-guilty verdict for TIME in 1985. But Sharon claimed a moral victory.

Despite the breakthrough between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1978, as well as the efforts of Yitzhak Rabin before his assassination in 1995, a lasting peace has been elusive. The Palestinians highlighted their plight by way of violent intifadehs, which proved counterproductive. They have, however, garnered some sympathy because of the expansion of Jewish settlements, which may augur a different tactic in the confrontation. Yasser Arafat, who never really lived down terrorist years, could not provide a sympathetic face for the Palestinian cause; but the unresolved future of his people and the security of Israel will continue to compel attention.