Gordon Carrera

And to me, that one moment in Leipzig is really interesting because it is the kind of moment where you've got the security forces ready to go, but there is a lack of will at the top.

The elite cohesion breaks down within the state over whether they're willing to repress

and take action.

Some people are questioning, would the soldiers actually shoot their own people?

It's quite a fine margin though, I think, because if the official had said shoot, might it have all been different?

Would the bandwagon have been stopped?

I don't know.

I think it's very interesting.

At the same time in Dresden, famously, you've got this young KGB officer called Vladimir Putin who is watching protests as well.

He asked the Soviet military commanders who are there based in East Germany what they're going to do and their reply is nothing because Moscow is silent.

And again, it's this interesting idea that the Soviet Union had signalled it was no longer willing to use force to back the regime in East Germany.

So that kind of foreign government role is very much a kind of role here that this kind of supporting state for East Germany had decided they weren't going to act.

We talked about this a bit in our kind of declassified club, didn't we, where we had Mark Gagliotti talking about how this had been a formative moment for Putin.

Because I think Putin himself, his lesson from this is if you're silent, then protests kind of gather momentum and they can overthrow a regime.

So his lesson is go in and go hard to crush the protests, which is something he will then do in neighbouring countries and in Russia itself.

There's a very interesting parallel as well from Iran to Hungary in 56, because I think in 56 a lot of the Hungarians thought the West was, and particularly the US, would come to help them.

And they felt they'd had that message actually from the West and almost encouragement to rise up, and then it never came.

which I think is an interesting parallel with Iran recently.

But also, just finally on 1989, there's a very interesting comparison from what we're talking about happened in Leipzig to China.

Because that same year, of course, June had seen Tiananmen Square.