English poet Richard Lovelace, usually celebrated for his Romantic poetry, offered the advice three centuries ago.  And history is replete with examples demonstrating you can’t imprison and enslave a people against their will no matter how much brute power you use to control and 
tyrannise them.

The world saw this happen yet again this day 20 years ago – on November 9, 1989.  The fall of the Berlin Wall that divided Germany and its people into two artificial camps after the World War II not just signalled the collapse of a concrete structure.  It marked the beginning of the end of what was known as the Eastern bloc or the communist empire led by the Soviet Union. 

The fall of the Berlin wall not just allowed the long suppressed and cocooned people in east Berlin and the communist East Germany to cross over into the other half of Berlin and the so-called Western paradise, but it also opened the floodgates to geopolitical changes that shook the world and changed the map forever.  The revolution that started with the fall of the Berlin wall didn’t stop in Germany.  It had a cascading effect across eastern Europe stretching right up to Moscow, the bastion of the mighty socialist empire built by Lenin and Stalin.  

The fall of Berlin was followed by the collapse of socialist regimes one after another across Europe.  It eventually culminated in the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War that had taken the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust.All those cataclysmic changes across the continent that had been the battleground of the two Great Wars wouldn’t have gone off so smoothly and relatively peacefully if it had not been for one man: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the late Soviet Union. 

Some Russians might hate him for presiding over the execution of their once powerful empire.  But the courageous visionary that he was, Gorbachev knew the façade behind the Iron curtain couldn’t be sustained any more. 

Thanks to the decades of economic mismanagement and corruption in the Red paradise and the trillions of dollars spent in sustaining the Cold war against the West at the expense of its people, the Soviet empire was on its last legs. This is why soon after he took over as the leader of the Communist Party — and its last — in 1985, Gorbachev introduced sweeping political and economic reforms now known as Glasnost and Perestroika. 

In fact, it was thanks to his bold policies of openness and making peace with the West that ushered in the dramatic change that manifested itself first in Berlin in 1989.  More important, Gorbachev did not resist the winds of change.  He accepted them. Imagine the bloody consequences if the Kremlin had tried to put down the revolt by force — as it had done earlier in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere in ‘50s and ‘60s. 

So the credit for those groundbreaking changes in the last couple of decades of the last century goes to Gorby.  There are lessons in this for all tyrants and big powers that try to impose their writ on a free people against their will.