After 1945 the world split in two, and over both halves reigned a single idol in two guises — absolute ideology and Force. Each superpower declared its own system the only true one, the crown of history, and turned the rest of the world into a chessboard. Nations ceased to be masters of their own fate and became "spheres of influence," pieces in another's game, moved and sacrificed by strategic calculation. The living history of whole continents was flattened into the line of confrontation between two centers.
The catastrophe of this way of thinking was measured in megatons. The race of nuclear arsenals reached the point of absurdity — the capacity to destroy the planet many times over. In October 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis carried humanity to the very brink: Soviet missiles in Cuba, an American blockade, and a handful of days in which the world stood a hair's breadth from universal destruction. And where the superpowers could not collide directly, they fought through other hands — "hot" wars on the periphery claimed millions of lives. Decolonization, too, was paid for in blood: the partition of India in 1947 uprooted some fourteen million people and killed hundreds of thousands along the new borders.
The captivity lasted nearly half a century — under the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction," in which survival itself rested on a balance of fear. It was not only ideologies that stood divided but living peoples: the Berlin Wall, raised in 1961, cut one city, one nation, one family after another in two with concrete and barbed wire. A border that had been a line on a map became a wall through the human heart — a man-made idol of division, declared eternal.
But every man-made idol falls when its hour comes. Nations became masters of their own fate once more — a wave of independence rolled across Asia and Africa, restoring to countries their names and their statehood. Slowly, arms-control treaties ripened — an admission that the race could have no victor. And in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell: what had been built as an unbreachable border between worlds collapsed almost without a shot, and the divided embraced on its rubble. Here too the law was fulfilled: a wall raised as eternal proved mortal, like everything man sets in the place of heaven.