Pilsner, Putin and Me (Part One).

(The senior editor is on holiday creating new good 'ol daze)

Some weeks back, I promised to tell you the story about the time back in the Dark Ages when I drank beer with Vladimir Putin. Then, as if by cue, my buddy went and invaded Georgia. As a result, I completely lost my nerve.

What was that? You say Putin’s no longer the president?

Duh. You don’t think it was Dimitry Medvedev’s idea, do you?

I must admit that at first, the notion of losing Georgia to Putin wasn’t a big issue to me. The Atlanta Braves aren’t winning any longer, and the unreconstructed rural crackers from the sticks probably will be voting for the has-been McCain and the wannabe Alaskan in November, anyway, but it soon became bitterly apparent that the Russians were grabbing a completely different Georgia (the place where Joe Stalin was born) and I totally lost interest.

Six Kobas or a half-dozen of Lester Maddox? Such a historical non-choice of despots neither matters, nor did my old pal Putin ask me for my opinion before the tanks started rolling. We really should have stayed closer, but you know how it goes.

Yes. Come again?

Yeah, right – drinking beer with Putin. What about the story? Okay, it’s coming, but first, a mild disclaimer.

Seeing that this tale from 1989 has unexpectedly taken on a life all its own, with requests for clarification pouring in from near and far, readers must be aware that it cannot be scientifically verified that I ever drank beer with Putin. Sorry. I can’t categorically prove that were at the same table, or that we ever met at all, although it is possible we sat in proximity in the same Dresden beer hall. I’m fairly certain that we were in the same urban area and time zone.

All of which begs the question: Exactly how did Mr. Putin and I come to be located in the same approximate geographical vicinity?

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It’s because I spent the first three weeks of August, 1989, buffing and polishing V. I. Lenin’s shoes.

More specifically, the footwear in question was attached to a gargantuan statue of Lenin, prominently located at the entrance to the Volkspark Friedrichshain in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic, henceforth to be referred to here as East Germany or the GDR. The ultimate objective of my voluntarily proffered shoeshine, and tree planting, and landscaping, was to make things look tidy and respectable in the Volkspark, which was cleverly reclaimed atop mounds of bombing rubble from World War II, and served afterward as the front yard for a hospital that often disgorged armless and legless pensioners for their afternoon constitutionals.

The stodgy and doctrinaire East German officialdom was in a summer deep cleaning mood of sorts that August, because an important celebration was being planned for September, 1989, when the GDR would be throwing a party in honor of its 40th birthday. Among the prestigious guests expected was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, progenitor of many socio-political trends that were not making the East German leadership feel very happy at the time.

In fact, there had already been embarrassingly public signs that ordinary East Germans were prepared to take Gorbachev’s attempted reforms seriously, and if unable to safely agitate for glasnost and perestroika within the GDR, then do the next best thing: Escape. They were driving their tiny asbestos-laden Trabants to Hungary for sanctioned holidays, then disappearing across the only recently porous Hungarian border into Austria with visas to take them to West Germany and sanctuary.

But none of that mattered, at least yet, so there were branches to be pruned, trees to be planted, hedges trimmed and streets swept until they groaned with unfamiliarity. The GDR certainly tried its best to look the way its press clippings always proclaimed it did, although it generally didn’t, and perhaps somewhere in a declassified Stasi file there exists a yellowed photo of me with a shovel in one hand and a mug of raspberry infused Berliner Weisse bier in the other … and that’s because hidden away in the center of the Volkspark was an Imbiss, a small sausage, snack and beer vending stand – with rows of wheelchairs parked in front – and while the recommended workers’ commissary back at the shop was cheaper, it served the same basic meal each day, and there wasn’t beer there.

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Of course, we know today that the GDR’s birthday bash, while smashingly choreographed, didn’t entirely go over as planned. In fact, 40 proved to be as good as it ever got for Communism, German-style, because behind the scenes over champagne and cocktail weenies, Gorbachev sternly lectured the hidebound East German nabobs and virtually disengaged the USSR from its surrogate’s future, setting crazy wheels into motion that culminated with the loss of lapdog Erich Honecker’s job, the fall of the Berlin Wall (Honecker’s pet project), and the disintegrated GDR’s unceremonious landing atop history’s scrap heap – all within an incredibly brief four-month period.

That’s a hellacious hangover by almost any standard, especially for a whole country, but naturally I didn’t know any of this in August, 1989, and although hindsight affords the clarity to recognize that those selected warning flags were beginning to fly, some already quite furiously, there was no credible reason at the time to believe that change was just around the corner.

Earlier that same year, Honecker had maintained that the Wall would stand for 50 or perhaps 100 more years, so long as the conditions prefacing it remained unchanged. It seemed so, and we saw no reason to suspend the formation of an East German-American Friendship Society back in Louisville, and to prematurely renounce the junkets we imagined such an organization would offer during the glorious proletarian future to come.

Turns out we were mistaken. We weren’t the only ones.

(Come back for Part Two tomorrow)