The young Harvard-educated economist Miklós Németh didn’t dream he would play a decisive role in the fall of the Berlin Wall when he was appointed Prime Minister by Hungary’s Communist Party to fix the nation’s finances in late 1988. Only a year later he was at the centre of it all.

On Wednesday 5 November, the Frontline Club tuned in to the world premier of 1989, a new documentary by Anders Østergaard detailing the months and days of Németh’s tense political manoeuvring that precipitated demolition of the wall, as it was shown in 57 cities across Europe during the 2014 Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX).

Stitching together archival footage seamlessly with reenactments of behind-the-scenes political moves, 1989 shows how Németh’s decision to dismantle one of the biggest drains on Hungary’s budget – a 240 kilometre-long electrical fence bordering Austria – reverberated through the former communist block. Just months later, tens of thousands of East Germans were scrambling across the divide.

Post-screening, Németh joined Danish Broadcast Corperation news anchor, Lene Johansen; professor and EU analyst, Lykke Friis; Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre, Hans Martens; and former Prime Minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, to reflect on 25 years of changes his decisions brought to Europe.

Continuing Conflict
The continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine was at the top of the agenda. “I am a great believer in dialogue and compromise. That is the way of finding your way out of a difficult situation,” Németh said of the fighting, adding that his good rapport with Mikhail Gorbachev helped guide him through difficult times.

“Putin is not stupid. I don’t like seeing a comment or an article in the paper that now we’re facing Cold War number two. This is not cold,” Németh said. “Last month Ukraine, Russia, and the EU signed a very important contract on the gas supply. So dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.”

What we’re seeing in Russia is a generation of people who never really accepted what happened in 1989, added Hans Martens. “I think they’re striking back now,” he said. “It’s not just about Ukraine and Crimea, it’s also about trying to reestablish a kind of Soviet Union or at least an empire like that. So dialogue is very good.”

Find out more about 1989 on the film’s website, where director Anders Østergaard will answer questions submitted by audiences from audiences all over Europe participating in this simultaneous screening.

Free societies crumbled in the decade after World War II, when Stalin took much of Eastern and Central Europe, and in a single-minded fashion, dismantled the existing institutions to build totalitarianism.

This period provides the subject for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s latest book Iron Curtain, which she discussed with journalists and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm before a sold-out audience at the Frontline Club on Monday 21 January.

“Why did anybody go along with totalitarianism?” she wondered before starting the book.

“Describe the scene for us,” Kamm began.

“It’s hard,” Applebaum answered. After the war, “the level of physical destruction…you had absolutely flat cities…totally destroyed transportation systems…economies that didn’t function – at all.”

“One of my most interesting interviews…was with a Polish writer… He was a Stalinist [at first], and he described that to me… Everything his parents had told him, and everything his schools had taught him, turned out to be wrong… The army failed. The government failed society collapsed… And that caused a kind of break in his mentality… he said…’you know, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the communists are right’.”

Applebaum described what followed:

“You had no good choices. You couldn’t just decide to be a freedom fighter and stand up for democracy. I mean, you could, then:  A. You would be arrested. B. Your wife would be arrested. C. Your child would get kicked out of college. D. Your mother would be thrown out of the hospital. Because the State had control over so many aspects of society, people had really very bad and hard decisions to make.”

But not even Stalin, totalitarianism’s maestro, couldn’t pull it off.

“The idea is that everyone will become convinced. They will be re-educated…and there will be no opposition… But somehow, it never works…[Even] at the very height of Stalinism in 1951 or ’52, they never actually made it.”

Yet for four decades, the Soviet bloc lived, and its unraveling still boggles Applebaum.

“It all seems so implausible to me. I mean: how did it happen? How can you explain it? Why did Gorbachev do what he did? Why did he just give up that enormous empire? Nobody was making him do it… Really, it could have gone on a lot longer.”

In much subtler shades, it has – under Vladimir Putin.

“He does care a lot, pretty inexplicably, in fact, about Pussy Riot,” Applebaum said. “There is a direct line from Putin to [Yuri] Andropov,” Soviet Ambassador to Budapest during Hungary’s rebellion 1956, and head of the KGB in the early 1980s.

“Putin came of age in Andropov’s KGB… He remembers ’89. He was taught by Andropov, who remembers ’56… The kind of treatment that dissidents or artists got in the Soviet Union in the first half of the ‘80s when Andropov was in power was almost as severe as in Stalin’s time… What was the conclusion? … all of these little groups who you thought weren’t important…you can let them go, [but] it can all unravel, and you can have an armed rebellion.”

Watch the full discussion here: