The courage behind the Anti Hustle Club by Cristina Lopez and Laura Bottin brings back a vivid memory from shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall—likely in the winter of 1987 or 1988 in the Ore Mountains. As a teenager, I was driving with my mother in our little Trabant toward the Czechoslovakian border. Hidden off the road in the woods near Reitzenhain, I spotted a Soviet military transport truck.
Since I was learning Russian and eager to talk to native speakers, I begged my mother to pull over. I walked up and knocked on the back door of the truck, where smoke was drifting from a small chimney. A Soviet soldier opened up, scanned us briefly, and invited us inside out of the freezing cold. Inside, a small group of soldiers sat huddled around a stove. The non-commissioned officer casually explained their unit's mission: to catch Soviet soldiers attempting to desert and cross the border.
Historically, desertion in the Soviet military meant immediate execution. But the officer calmly explained that under Gorbachev, the writing was on the wall: the era of dictatorship was ending. He and his men had no intention of hunting down or condemning their fellow comrades. While East German hardliners were still desperately trying to preserve totalitarian control through force, the soldiers on the ground had already embraced quiet defiance.
They simply refused to enforce brutal orders, granting their comrades freedom —civil disobedience at its highest human level.
