The Soviet Union and East Germany had no choice but to go with the flow when the Berlin Wall started to fall in 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader at the time, said in a program aired Sunday.
And East German leader Erich Honecker was toppled because he failed to anticipate what would happen, Gorbachev told a British Broadcasting Corp. television program marking the fifth anniversary of the wall's collapse."At nine in the morning our embassy reported to us what had happened overnight and how the East German leadership was acting, that it was trying to resolve the situation by political means, that it did not intend to act in any other way, and we supported this," Gorbachev said.
"My advice was since events had taken this turn, they should absolutely not oppose this mood and movement of the people with force. That was impossible."
But he said Honecker, who was forced from office in the weeks leading up to the destruction of the wall which brought German reunification a year later, was so devoted to the ideal of communism that he could not see that hardliners were going to be forced to soften their approach.
"I am sure that events in East Germany could have developed differently," said Gorbachev, himself forced out of office by current President Boris Yeltsin and other liberals.
"They should have found a policy of initiation which would have turned relations between the two halves (of Germany) round, forged a relationship appropriate to the changed times. I think they missed that by a long way," he said.
Honecker, who died last June, was not a bad man but he failed to see his own shortcomings, Gorbachev told the BBC.