The Wall fell and hope rose - for a while

Millions have become freer and more prosperous since the end of the Cold War but the battle for liberal values goes on, writes Andrew Rawnsley.

One of the tricks played by time is to turn the incredible into the inevitable.

World leaders gathered in Germany yesterday to deliver sonorous speeches celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that pivotal moment at the end of the Cold War when the starkest symbol of the Iron Curtain was physically torn down.

The implosion of Moscow's empire can now seem preordained.

Soviet communism was so economically disastrous and politically atrophied that its totalitarianism was always destined for defeat by the prosperous liberal democracies led by the United States.

For all the regiments of tanks and ballistic missiles that were paraded in Red Square, the Kremlin and the grisly henchmen who held central and eastern Europe in chains could never win.

Such is the conventional wisdom today.

Yet the triumph of the West did not seem anything like so inevitable during the four decades of nuclear-tipped competition.

The Soviet Union beat America into space in the late '50s and early '60s, first with Sputnik and then with a man called Yuri.

"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side," bragged Nikita Krushchev.

"We will bury you."

Many Western leaders feared that prediction would prove accurate.

Harold Macmillan, Britain's Conservative prime minister, privately lamented to colleagues that communism's apparent ability to mobilise and direct its citizenry in a way free societies never could was likely to end in Soviet economic and military supremacy.

I am of the Cold War generation: not baby-boomers, but atomic babies.

I was born in the year of the Cuban missile crisis.

The images, the tunes, the fashions, the badges, the rhetoric, the taste, the smell, the life of my childhood, teens and 20s is the Vietnam War, CND, Nixon in China, cruise missiles, Greenham Common, John le Carre, the gulags, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Solidarity, Salt talks, Start talks, the four-minute warning, "duck and cover" and the hilarious "protect and survive" leaflets with their handy tips about how to use mattresses and cardboard boxes to build a refuge from radiation.

My daughters are now taught the Cold War as history.

For us, it was an ever-present.

Always hovering at the dark edges of the mind, and thrust to the front of it at moments of tension between the superpowers, was the knowledge that a miscalculation in the White House or the Kremlin could climax with planetary annihilation.

One of the paradoxes of the Cold War is that it was the first global ideological competition which had the capacity to obliterate Western civilisation and yet it was also the first struggle for domination to end peacefully.

All previous confrontations between two highly armed and aggressively paranoid powers had ultimately come to a head with their armies clashing on battlefields.

These two fought each other by proxy, but never directly.

The Cold War is unique in ending because one side simply gave up.

It did not seem at all inevitable until it happened that the Soviet leadership, under the enlightened Mikhail Gorbachev, would not react violently to the break-up of its empire.

The shattering of the Iron Curtain was an epochal event which not only stood down the nuclear confrontation that threatened to destroy the world, but also liberated many millions of people.

The hope generated by the popular and velvet revolutions in Europe helped to fuel an extraordinary burst of international optimism in the years immediately afterwards.

Nelson Mandela was released from apartheid's prison to lead another remarkable transition in southern Africa.

The fragmentation of the Soviet bloc reheated some conflicts previously frozen by the Cold War, leading to vicious ethnic warfare in the former Yugoslavia.

It was an unalloyed good in many other regions of the world.

Both the US and the USSR had prosecuted their rivalry by sustaining diabolical client regimes and brutal insurgencies in Africa, Asia and South America.

The fall of the Wall was followed by the growth of democracy and respect for human rights in many lands previously barren of both.

In the West, the event initially proved to be better for parties of the Left than of the Right.

The Cold War had split the Left over nuclear weapons and the Atlantic alliance.