“Chancellor Kohl and I thought that it would happen in the 21^st century. We are not very good clairvoyants,” Gorbachev said in Berlin, where he was attending ceremonies marking 20 years since the Wall fell on November 9, 1989.

“Every day we talked about how the German question could be solved — and then it went and happened on November 9. You could tell that this era was going to end,” he said.

Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union when a peaceful popular uprising led the authorities in communist East Germany to allow people to cross into West Berlin. Eleven months later West and East Germany unified.