Gorbachev allies feel betrayed by West, 25 years on

Swept along by the excitement as the Berlin Wall was torn down, former top Soviet officials now say, 25 years on, they feel stabbed in the back by the West.
      
Igor Maximychev watched with trepidation from the Soviet embassy in Berlin as East Germans streamed towards the Wall the night it came down.        

"I heard their footsteps and above all I feared that I would hear shooting," the former advisor to the Soviet ambassador, now 82, told AFP.        

"But there weren't any shots. And then there wasn't a border anymore either," he said, recalling events on November 9, 1989.
      
Anatoly Chernyaev was a foreign policy advisor to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the heady years of "perestroika" and "glasnost" introduced by Gorbachev after coming to power in 1985.
      
After decades of bitter enmity during the Cold War, East-West relations gradually turned around under these policies of reform and transparency.
      
When Gorbachev refused to intervene militarily as the Communist bloc crumbled across Eastern Europe, ties "above all with the American leadership" rapidly became "personal even friendly," said Chernyaev, now 95.
      
"With the fall of the Berlin Wall it became clear that this process had became irreversible," he told AFP.
      
"It was a period of general euphoria."                       

The Wall's collapse ushered in the end of communist East Germany and the country's reunification the following October.
      
But the other events that followed -- the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the expansion of NATO to the east -- now cast a long shadow over the memory of those momentous times.        

"The reunification of...