The fall of communism in Europe came as no surprise to Zbiginew Brzezinski. He told a Georgetown audience recently that he saw the day coming long before working as national security advisor in the Carter administration.

“I was always convinced that the Soviet Union would break up at some point, and that goes back to my graduate days,” said Brzezinski during a Nov. 19 conversation with Brent Scowcroft at Georgetown. Scowcroft served as national security advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

The Soviet Union attempted to thrive as an imperialist institution in a post-imperial world, said Brzezinski. He knew nationalist intentions of the Russian people would eventually break up the Eastern bloc.


The Thursday evening discussion kicked off a two-day conference, “The 20th Anniversary of the End of a Divided Europe,” sponsored by the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and the BMW Center for German and European Studies.

The pair talked about their experiences in markedly different administrations that led before, during and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 and the domino effect it had, leading to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft shared their insights with a small audience in Riggs Library that included some key players in U.S.-Russian relations during the final years of communism’s reign: former President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski; Jack Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); and Andrei Grachev, former political adviser and spokesman for former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Once the Berlin Wall started coming down, the Bush administration received criticisms claiming the United States didn’t respond as effectively as it should have to the end of the communism.

Scowcroft, who now leads his own international business advisory firm, recalled a media interview that Bush gave during the Berlin Wall’s collapse. A reporter asked the president why he wasn’t “dancing on the wall, exuberantly” as a sign to other world leaders. Scowcroft said the president responded, “Well, I’m not an exuberant kind of person.”

Brzezinski believes Bush’s response was both cautious and appropriate.

“When history is in the process of unfolding in a very spontaneous, but also very complex fashion, you don’t take tremendous gambles,” said Brzezinski, who is now the  Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University and counselor and trustee for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Scowcroft shared his thoughts about the successes and challenges faced after the fall of communism.

“What we fundamentally got right is that [the process] happened peacefully,” said Scowcroft, noting that the latter years of the Cold War between the Western powers and primarily the USSR focused on the nuclear arms race.

“I think what we got wrong… was that we didn’t really analyze what a traumatic experience the end of the Cold War was for the average Russian,” he added. “I think that has created a backlash that we could have avoided, simply by being more attuned to the psychological atmosphere that had to be present.”

CERES director Angela Stent moderated the evening’s discussion and said she believed the two speakers provided an unparalleled viewpoint from two important players in U.S.-Soviet Union relations.

“[Brzezinski and Scowcroft] reminded us that the fall of the communist system was not pre-ordained. It required courageous actions by the people in the region and careful statecraft on the part of the United States and its allies to ensure that Germany was united peacefully and that the Soviet Union collapsed without a major war breaking out.”

-- Rob Mathis

(November 24, 2009)