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Regional secretary with the National Education Union
'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 at the UZ Pressfest last weekend

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.”

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