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The Soviet historiography, also extending the Cold War, shared the sense of stalemate. This perspective, beginning with proletarian revolution, readily expressed the Cold War as a class struggle. Gorbachev, considering nuclear attack less likely, possibly believing the potential of SDI or perceiving its naive foundation, was able to transcend Soviet orthodoxy creating a radical comprehension of past systemic failure. Added to this reassessment of the Soviet world view was the fragmentation experienced in the Eastern Bloc with previously passive satellites like Poland contentiously espousing liberalism. Whereas the United States held to an unyielding perception of Soviet totalitarianism, parts of the Soviet regime understood that change was inevitable.

Gorbachev’s reforms, highlighted by glasnost and perestroika, refuted the command economy and regarded totalitarianism as an unworkable ethic. As the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis represented tipping points in Cold War historiography, the fall of the Berlin Wall, where Gorbachev played a keystone role, marked its demise.

Whether late eighties summits resulted in a meaningful exchange between the folksy Reagan and the emollient Gorbachev is problematic although they did result in the abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons. The view of history which perpetuated the Cold War, driven by equally culpable states harnessed to a technology fuelled race for supremacy, was being re-defined. A new openness was manifest. At the Brandenberg Gate, Reagan called out to Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” Drama has a role to play in international relations and perhaps Gorbachev responded to Reagan’s theatrics by refusing East German requests for Soviet tanks in Liepzig to suppress protestors using the Nikolai Church as the focal point for liberalisation demands. These events, together with Hungary opening its borders, precipitated the collapse of the Berlin Wall by popular action.

Gorbachev’s predecessors viewed the Berlin Wall as emblematic of East West confrontation. Gorbachev’s insights viewed the Wall as largely irrelevant and dispensable. The New York Times cited the Premier: “The wall can disappear when those conditions that created it fall away…I don't see a major problem here.” He went on, ‘7 think we have come out of a period of cold war, even if there are still some chills and drafts… We are simply bound to a new stage of relations, one I would call the peaceful period in the development of international relations.” ¹¹ Gorbachev surpassed a view of history which saw Cold War “conditions” as immutable. He had support from Medvedev, Chemyaev, Yakolev and Shevardnadze – an iconoclastic cell aimed at reform.¹²