“Nazis?  Who said we were Nazis?  We’re Communists!”

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What was the Cold War?

It might sound like a competition between rival refrigerator manufacturers.  Well, it was.

In fact, it was fought with everything — including refrigerators, phones and spies. Free market capitalists on one side, Communists on the other.

One of the hottest places of the Cold War was Berlin, a city divided into two halves by the Berlin Wall. One half was capitalist, the other half Communist. I will explain.

After the Second World War ended in 1945, the newly defeated Nazi Germany lost some of its territory to its neighbors, having previously treated those neighbors rather rudely. (Actually, very rudely.) The rest of Germany, including the capital Berlin, got divided by the victorious Allies into four zones of military occupation, one each for the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.

At that time the Soviet Union was the world’s leading Communist power. Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), inhabitants of that mouthful were called Soviets. They were less accurately called Russians, because what we call “Russia” was only one of several nations that comprised (i.e., were stuck inside) the huge Soviet Union. Many millions of people died under Communism, several millions of whom were Russians. In all but name the Soviet Union was an empire, and a particularly nasty one at that. The word Soviet, by the way, is the Russian word for “committee.” It is a strange way of describing yourself. And yet remarkably appropriate for a country whose government perfected the art of bureaucratic inefficiency.

“Hi, my name is John. I’m an American.”

“Hi, my name is Ivan. I’m a Committee.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Okay, back to Germany. The three zones occupied by the Americans, British and French eventually became the democratic country of West Germany, plus West Berlin. The fourth zone, controlled by the Soviet Union, became the Communist state of East Germany and its capital, East Berlin. Back during World War II, Nazi Germany had invaded and almost defeated the Soviet Union. With that memorable history in mind, the Soviet Union’s new puppet ally of East Germany became Moscow’s most trustworthy of allies, and also its least trusted. Those fraternal feelings were reciprocated.

“Fritz, you’re a good German Communist. But why do you keep saying ‘Our Soviet brothers’? The official Party-approved phrase is ‘Our Soviet friends’.”

“Because you can pick your friends.”

With the entire city of Berlin located in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone, West Berlin was stranded inside the middle of East Germany. It was a fluke of fate and politics that rendered the West Berliners, and likewise the American, British and French soldiers stationed there, all a bit Commie claustrophobic. But they all decided to stay put, in West Berlin, where the place became a little landlocked island of democracy, enjoying a deliciously decadent capitalist party-animal lifestyle — surrounded by the Berlin Wall, adorned with barbed wire, machine guns, trigger-happy guards, and, beyond them, a dour Communist state.

And I do mean dour. East Germany’s secret police were called the Stasi, pronounced STAH-zee. Now there’s a weird name. In Nazi Germany, the secret police were called the Gestapo. At least Gestapo sounds sinister. Stasi sounds girlie. “Hello, this is my brother Tony. And these are my sisters, Gracie, Stacy, and Stasi.”

Alas, the Stasi had no sense of humor.

For more than forty years the entirety of Berlin remained divided. West Berlin became a showcase of Western free enterprise prosperity. The Communists called West Berlin a blemish upon the self-proclaimed “workers paradise” of East Germany — an unfair capitalist/Commie contrast between the moneyed materialism of the West and the ideological purity of the Communist East. Communist dictatorships decried any private property as being downright obscene. So, for the good of “the People” (who never had any say in the matter), those dictatorships confiscated the entire economy. “So, you filthy capitalist, do you own a private business? Not anymore. It now belongs to the government.” And so do you.

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Which system is better? Well, between filthy rich capitalism and naked Communism, most people preferred to get shamefully dirty. And that really annoyed the Communists, who were overly serious about such things. What did those Western capitalists think they were? Rich? Acting so cool and vogue with their fancy cars, their blue jeans and bikinis and cowboy hats, their stable television sets — “stable” meaning those TVs never exploded — and wallets packed with paper money that was actually worth something. Worst of all, those Westerners had that most hedonistic of extravagances, privacy. Who needs privacy? Only people with — ideas. Proper Communists could not understand why anybody would prefer a society of Rock-and-Roll, jazz, and free debate over their Commie paradise of cramped apartments, cheap television sets (okay, maybe they sometimes exploded), tapped telephone lines, media censorship, obligatory lectures on fun topics like Marxist-Leninist economics, hours and hours of Party Chairman speeches, very nosy secret police, and everyday neighbors who were paid to snitch on you.

Revolutionary red was the official color of Communism. And yet for some reason the predominant color of the streets, of the buildings, of the neighborhoods, indeed of this entire society of the future, this workers paradise, was soot gray.

Yep, that is definitely revolutionary.

And boring.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple

Secret Agent Extraordinaire

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