The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end, The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and westen European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees.

Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing toget…