The television channel NTV is set to broadcast political commentator Vladimir Kondratyev's documentary film about the fall of the Berlin Wall at 19:25 on Sunday, November 8. Vladimir Kondratyev was chief of the Soviet Radio and Television Office in Bonn in 1989.
The film has been a talking point for quite some time, long before its release date, and with good reason: it involves prominent politicians, public figures, military commanders and journalists from Russia and Germany who witnessed the historic events firsthand. Among those who contributed to the film are Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the USSR, Richard von Weizsacker, former President of the FRG in 1984-1994, Lotar de Mezier, the head of the GDR Government after the fall of the Wall, Egon Krentz, General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev's son. Vladimir Kondratyev shared his thoughts about the film with RG.
Q.: I watch your news reports quite often. But have you ever done projects as big as "The Wall" before?
A.: Yes. When I worked in the FRG I made a lot of films of this scale. But, honestly, I haven't made any in Moscow yet.
Q.: Quite a few events are timed to coincide with the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've attended two exhibitions that mark the date. But your film has spurred such extraordinary interest because it features an interview with the prime minister.
A.: I haven't been to any of these exhibitions. But I'm certainly aware that my film has attracted attention.
Q.: Is it because it's the first time the prime minister is appearing in a documentary? Is he a commentator in the film?
A.: No, he appears as an eye-witness and even a participant in the events. Imagine the historic episode that unfolded when he faced an angry crowd in Dresden bent on destroying the building that housed Soviet intelligence headquarters.
When Putin became president, he published the book "In the First Person", an autobiography in which he describes his whole life. The book used the format of a conversation. Putin talks about the time he spent as an intelligence agent in Dresden, and one day, demonstrators showed up in front of the building where he worked. They had just destroyed the building of the Stasi in Dresden and were about to storm a small building next door, where Soviet intelligence was based. Putin came out to face the demonstrators and when they asked why he spoke German so well, he pretended to be an interpreter. He managed to convince them that the building belonged to the Soviet Army and that they were working under a contract with the GDR. It worked and the crowd eventually left.
Q.: Was it hard to get an interview with Putin for this film?
A.: It was really quite simple. I just rang him up. He immediately agreed and the next thing you know, we were sitting and talking over a cup of tea... I'm joking, of course!
Honestly, I wasn't sure that it would work out. But we approached him about it and I'm extremely grateful to him for showing an interest and actually responding. I think the fact that he agreed to the interview shows that he's interested in the topic and that he wants to pay homage to his tour of duty in the German Democratic Republic. In a way, he and I are colleagues; we're both specialists on Germany. And we lived there at the same time! Only I lived in the FRG, and he was in the GDR.
Q.: How long was the interview with the prime minister? Did you put everything that he said in the film?
A.: Just about everything. No single important remark was omitted. The film is about an hour long and Putin appears several times.
Q.: Was there anything in what the prime minister had to say that especially struck you, or did you already pretty much know what he would talk about?
A.: I had a rough idea, since I was asking questions and they had to be phrased in some way. I was particularly interested in his assessment of the Berlin Wall. When and how he saw it for the first time, and what he thought when it was destroyed. He provides an interesting assessment of the situation in the GDR at the time. In his opinion, it was a splinter of the Soviet system of the 1970s, and perhaps even of earlier times. The Soviet Union was already in the throes of the perestroika and glasnost, but it didn't seem like anything was going on in East Germany. Putin was worried about the people of the GDR and the Berlin Wall struck him as unnatural and unreal. He contrasted it with the Great Wall of China, which has been standing for centuries. That wall was designed to protect people, but the Berlin Wall did just the opposite - it divided people. The fall was inevitable, because the wall itself was so unnatural.
As Putin put it, "It was impossible to preserve it in the modern world." I asked him if he thought it was the end of the GDR when the wall fell. He replied, "Yes more than no. It was clear to me that a decision had been made in favour of direct unification." I then asked him if everything had been done after the fall of the wall to protect the interests of our country during the reunification process. He pointed out that we were all smart in hindsight. "I would rather not talk about how I would have acted myself. But what happened had to happen. The division of Germany had no historical future. As for the protection of our interests, certain things could have been done differently, of course, but I think the processes all accomplished the main goal. The biggest plus is that a new quality of relations between Russia and Germany emerged, a sense of trust and gratitude. That's one of the cornerstones in the foundation of our relations, and the building of our cooperation today rests on that."
There was another thing he said that I found especially interesting. When I asked him if he felt nostalgic when he visited the former GDR, a country that so many years of his life were linked with, he admitted that there was some nostalgia, but only on a personal level. He recalled how he lived in the GDR, studied German, communicated with neighbours and discovered a whole new world for himself. But then he said: "We can see how the FRG is developing within a united Germany and we're glad that our relations are developing too, and that pushes all the nostalgia into the background."
If you'd like to know what I think about that interview, I'd say that it's the first time a top leader appears in a documentary film and assesses the events of twenty years ago, with the exception of Gorbachev, of course. In this country, there was a feeling that we had parted with the GDR too easily, renounced our ally and surrendered it to the West. Putin actually closed the chapter on all of this in these discussions. He said that the wall was unnatural and the division was unnatural as well. Everything that happened was part of the natural course of history. While visiting Poland recently, the prime minister said that relations with the FRG served as an example for other countries. They're developing quite successfully.
Our film is the first attempt to give a detailed account of how that odious structure came to be, and, more importantly, of how the border was opened. We obtained almost all the footage taken that shows how it happened. Very few people actually know that a public announcement about the opening of the border was made, because some GDR leaders had their wires crossed at the time. When the crowd rushed to the wall, the commander of the border guards on Bornholmer Strasse had no instructions or documents whatsoever. He was forced to decide for himself whether to open fire to protect the border or open the border. And so Harald Yager, without any orders, used his own judgment and decided to open up the border. He was hailed as a national hero then, and later he became a taxi-driver and eventually opened up his own newspaper kiosk...
Susanna Alperina