Skip to main content
'Every weapons delivery is a licence to kill' - an interview with Egon Krenz
Ben Chacko speaks to East Germany's last leader about a world dividing again into armed camps
Egon Krenz

THE death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week brought discussion of the collapse of Soviet socialism back to the fore — especially as the neoliberal world order it ushered in is crumbling around us.

Just a couple of days before the last leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s death I was sat with the last leader of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), Egon Krenz, a speaker at one of the multiple political talks and rallies that with music, food and drink make up the Unsere Zeit press festival.

Krenz led the German Democratic Republic for a mere six weeks in late 1989 and, unlike Gorbachev, can take neither blame nor credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall: “It was too late for me to do anything.”

Donate to the Fighting Fund
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Burnt cars remain in the middle of a street following the re
Features / 22 March 2025
22 March 2025
Ben Chacko asks NIZAR TRABULSI of the now banned Syrian Communist Party (Unified) to explain the country's turbulent, and violent, post-Assad scene
Delegates chat as they leave the Great Hall of the People af
Features / 22 March 2025
22 March 2025
From renewable tech to alternatives to the dollar, BEN CHACKO was encouraged by an optimistic meeting held by the China Media Group this week
Similar stories
9 - German arms to Ukraine (1)
Features / 11 April 2025
11 April 2025
Despite the US withdrawal from Ukraine and economic self-harm from sanctions, European centrists maintain their bellicosity to justify military spending and distract from neoliberalism's failures, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
Raising_a_flag_over_the_Reichstag_-_Restoration
Features / 30 January 2025
30 January 2025
NICK WRIGHT examines the British ruling class's complex relationship with fascism before, during and after the second world war
8sevimdagdelen
Features / 27 November 2024
27 November 2024
Anti-imperialist organisation Liberation conducts a Q&A with German MP SEVIM DAGDELEN on the attitudes of the ‘war-drunk’ main German political parties, Nato policy-makers’ detachment from reality and the prospect of bringing about a common platform for de-escalation