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Why Berlin MatteredHow could one city mean so much?

By Fred KaplanPosted Friday, Nov. 6, 2009, at 3:14 PM ET

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Even Allen Dulles, the hawkish director of the CIA, thought Khrushchev's speech represented a "sea change" in Soviet policy.

Stateside, Air Force generals and congressional Democrats were spreading reports that the Soviets were way ahead of the United States in ICBMs. Eisenhower knew that the most highly classified intelligence—based on secret flights of U-2 spy planes over Soviet territory—contradicted that claim. Still, the evidence wasn't clear. Dulles said that one more U-2 flight would settle the matter. Eisenhower, who'd halted the flights after Soviet complaints, authorized one more, to take place on May Day 1960.

The rest is sad history. A Soviet air-defense battery shot down the plane. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, did not swallow the cyanide pill as he was supposed to. The Soviets displayed the downed plane. Eisenhower, assuming Powers was dead, lied and said the plane must have veered off course. Meanwhile, Soviet intelligence officers interrogated Powers, learned the truth—then produced Powers himself, much to Eisenhower's embarrassment.

Khrushchev, who had taken great political risks in cuddling up to the West, stormed out of the Paris summit and withdrew his disarmament plan. The prospects for Soviet reform and East-West peace vanished, not to be revived for another 27 years.

The main point, though, is this: Even if there hadn't been a U-2 crisis, the Paris summit was doomed to failure. Khrushchev's disarmament offer was contingent on the West's giving up Berlin. And, as Eisenhower told him (and as the Western European leaders affirmed), that wasn't going to happen.

Meanwhile, young Eastern Europeans were still leaving the Soviet empire through West Berlin. When John F. Kennedy became president in January 1961, Khrushchev renewed his threats.

Finally, on Aug. 13, Khrushchev ordered East German troops to occupy the border separating the two halves of the city and to lay the first layers of brick and barbed wire of what would become the Berlin Wall.

In a sense, the wall marked the end of Khrushchev's crisis. But Kennedy took the move as the possible beginning of a wider threat. He poured money into the defense budget for conventional forces; he even seriously, though briefly, considered a plan to launch a disarming first strike against the Soviet Union should Khrushchev try to occupy West Berlin.

By October, the Soviets had closed off all but one border crossing. On Oct. 27, in a now-forgotten confrontation (one year before the Cuban missile crisis), Soviet and American tanks faced each other along that checkpoint, at short range, for 16 hours until negotiations were held and the Soviet tanks backed off. The crisis faded.

There would never be another crisis over Berlin (which may be why all the previous ones have largely been forgotten). The Soviet rulers had no need to threaten West Berlin as long as the wall kept their own people locked in.

The wall was built to bottle up an incipient revolt—a mass emigration that threatened to expose the Soviet system as inferior to the West, as an oppressive dungeon that its most educated young people yearned to escape. The wall not only blocked those yearnings; it also made clear to the brighter young Soviet and Eastern European leaders that the system itself—the ideological basis of their rule—was suspect, that it could not be sustained, much less compete with the West, without the internal imposition of force.

Khrushchev was ousted by hardliners in 1964. For the next quarter-century, the Kremlin's leaders devolved into increasingly sluggish bureaucrats; the system itself bogged down more and more obviously. In 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev set a course of serious reform and reopened the Soviet Union to the world, the possibilities that had been unleashed in the late 1950s, but suppressed ever since, once more bubbled up in the popular imagination. And when the wall came down, it was like a cork exploding.

The end of the Soviet Union—and, with it, the end of the Cold War—was, at that point, nearly inevitable.