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Author : V. Grinin
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the Federal Republic of
Germany
This essay was written in April 2014 at the request of Uwe Lehmann-
Brauns, a member of the state parliament of Berlin. A German translation
of it was included in the collection Wer ist Berlin? published in early 2015.
I HAVE spent a total of 10 years working in Berlin. This is long
enough to become a genuine Berliner. But am I a genuine Berliner?
I'm hardly genuine because, after all, I have mostly had to be a sideline
observer of what's happening in this city, although it is always with
great interest, with tremendous warmness and affection, with sym-
pathy and at times empathy that I do my observations.
As I was getting to know the Berlin of those days better and better,
my deepening romantic feelings about it were increasingly accompa-
nied by a realization that the city was a unique geopolitical symbol - a symbol of the Cold War,
a symbol of division. Division of the entire world, not only Germany. And, in fact, the Berlin
Wall itself didn't just divide that German city but was a point where two ideologies clashed and
a line of confrontation passed between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, between East and West.
On both sides of that line, which ran through what, by global standards, was a tiny bit of territory,
there lived men and women who belonged to the same nation but followed essentially different
ideological, social and moral principles. Four major global powers had armed forces and military
command posts based there. In other words, Berlin accumulated an enormous conflict potential,
and in that situation any move that went even slightly wrong might have had disastrous conse-
quences.
What began to happen in Berlin immediately after the reunification formalities made such ben-
efits patently obvious. The city was abuzz with activity. The wall was being torn down and
through traffic was being restored along streets that it had divided, turning each of them into
two dead ends. Other over-and underground transportation lines were getting joined together
as well. I remember that, just outside the gate of our embassy, the ground was broken up all of
a sudden, revealing an entrance to a mothballed underground station that very few people had
even known about.
The numbers of tourists visiting Berlin had grown immensely. The city had generally become
more attractive, more inviting and more accessible. Probably for the Berliners themselves as well
- the city's population had changed in composition noticeably as people from other parts of
Germany and other countries, including Russia, had been moving in.
As an admirer of the great Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, I'd like to draw a
parallel between what is going on in the Euro-Atlantic space today and Satan's grand ball de-
http://interaffairs.ru
How Berlin Can Change the World: A Phantasmagorical Sketch