Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, 1989
1989: The Collapse of Communism and End of the Cold War
The year 1989 has become a symbol of revolution in much the same way that 1789 has, and if the fall of the Bastille in Paris epitomizes the French Revolution, the collapse of the Berlin Wall defines the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of communism in Europe. If anything, the events of 1989 were even more startling and sweeping than those of two hundred years before. In the course of just six months, communist governments were swept out of power in all of Eastern Europe, and within a few years after that, out of the Soviet Union as well. After forty years of division, Germany was reunified and Eastern Europe began its march to the West. The Cold War was over.
The speed and scale of these changes are even more remarkable given the seeming rigidity and solidity of the Soviet bloc since World War II. Although resistance and dissent had occurred in Eastern Europe over the years, any significant challenges or changes were stymied or crushed by Moscow. After the early 1970s, however, the legitimacy of the Eastern European communist governments was increasingly eroded by economic stagnation and the growth of a “civil society.” When Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet Party leader in 1985 and called for “restructuring” of the communist states, wittingly or unwittingly, he unleashed these forces for change. As reform spiraled into revolution, Gorbachev himself fell from power as the Soviet Union fell apart.
With the dissolution of the USSR, fifteen new independent states emerged, and as after the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars, the map of Europe was redrawn. In both Eastern Europe and most of the states of the former Soviet Union, governments were reconstituted as democracies and economic systems as capitalist. Many of these states tried to reorient themselves away from Russia and toward Western Europe, and almost all of them applied for membership in either NATO or the European Union. Europe was no longer divided.
BEFORE 1989: SOVIET HEGEMONY AND THE BREZHNEV DOCTRINE
After World War II, the Soviet Union established a tightly integrated and controlled alliance of communist states in Eastern Europe, which were referred to in the West as Soviet satellites, or the Soviet bloc. These states (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania) all had essentially a single dominant political party, the Communist Party, and a centrally planned and state-owned economy. Their foreign trade was mostly with each other and the Soviet Union, and they all belonged to the Moscow-dominated military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Albania and Yugoslavia, neither of which bordered on the Soviet Union, also had communist systems but were neither subservient to Moscow or nor members of the Warsaw Pact.
While Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, there was little room for dissent, opposition, or differentiation in Eastern Europe: All of the governments there followed the Soviet model in lockstep. With Stalin’s death in 1953, some relaxation of control occurred both within the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, and some countries were able to carve out niches of limited autonomy for themselves. Poland, for example, was allowed to maintain independent, private farming in the countryside and to keep open its many Roman Catholic churches and seminaries. Romania, while keeping tight internal controls, was able to maintain a relatively independent foreign policy, although it remained a member of the Warsaw Pact.
There were, however, strict limits to how far the Eastern European states could stray from the Soviet path, and when it seemed to Moscow that communist rule or bloc solidarity was threatened, it would use intimidation or force to set things right. After the death of Stalin, for example, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, began a program of “de-Stalinization” of the Soviet Union, resulting in the release of many political prisoners, restrictions on the secret police, and relaxation of censorship. In Eastern Europe, these changes were taken as license for reform. In 1956, in Poland, workers’ demonstrations and strikes forced a change in leadership in that country and the installation of a more national-minded Communist Party leader, who assured Moscow that the country would remain communist. That same year in Hungary, young people toppled the huge statue of Stalin in the center of Budapest, and a reformist leadership declared the country neutral and tried to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. This went beyond the permissible limits for the Kremlin (the Soviet leadership), which ordered a military intervention to crush the rebellion. Thousands of Hungarians were killed, and several hundred thousand fled into exile.
The next serious challenge to Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Europe came from Czechoslovakia in 1968. There, a liberalizing Communist Party leader named Alexander Dubcek spoke about creating “socialism with a human face.” The Communist Party’s reform program attacked the concentration of power in the party and proposed freedom of the press, assembly, and travel. The Soviet leadership, now under Leonid Brezhnev, cautioned the Czechoslovaks to rein in the reform, and when they were unable to do so, Moscow led an invasion of 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops to “normalize” the country. The Prague Spring came to an early end in the face of Soviet tanks. The Soviet leadership justified the invasion by arguing that if socialism was in jeopardy in any communist state, this constituted a threat to all socialist states and thus required action by the entire socialist community. In essence, the Brezhnev Doctrine, as it was dubbed in the West, gave Moscow the right to intervene in any country in the bloc to prevent the deterioration of Communist Party control.
The Brezhnev Doctrine cast a pall over Eastern Europe for the next decade, but it did not deter the Poles from periodic bouts of strikes and unrest. Indeed, Poland had a tradition of revolt, often against the Russians, that dated back to the eighteenth-century era of the Partitions, when the Polish state was gobbled up by its three powerful neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. This tradition continued even after the consolidation of communist power, with demonstrations, strikes, or riots in 1956, 1968, 1970, and 1976.
The most powerful challenge to communist rule came in Poland in the summer of 1980, when workers went on strike to protest food price increases. At the huge Lenin Shipyards in the coastal city of Gdansk (formerly the German city of Danzig), a shipyard electrician named Lech Walesa assumed leadership of the strike committee, which represented and coordinated strike activity at over two hundred enterprises.
The workers forced the government to agree to their list of twenty-one demands, which included the formation of their own trade union, independent of the Communist Party. The workers named the union Solidarnos´c´ (Solidarity).
Over the next sixteen months, some twelve million people (out of a total workforce of sixteen million) joined Solidarity. The position of Solidarity was strengthened further with the moral support of Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, who had been elected just two years before. With practically universal support in the country, the union became more and more powerful, and increasingly challenged the authority of the Communist Party. This raised concern in the Soviet leadership, which several times staged threatening military maneuvers along the Polish borders.
Finally, under pressure from the Kremlin, in December 1981, the Polish government declared martial law, arrested Walesa and the rest of the Solidarity leadership, and banned the union.
This seemed to be yet another affirmation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. But in Poland, the situation and results were different from those in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the first place, the Soviet army had not intervened directly, apparently fearing massive Polish national resistance to the use of Soviet troops. Second, the martial law abolition of Solidarity was not entirely effective. The union was reconstituted as an illegal underground organization and continued its activities in organizing strikes and demonstrations and publishing newsletters. Most important, however, was the simple legacy of Solidarity. One Solidarity adviser, Adam Michnik, observed that Solidarity had existed long enough to convince everyone that, after martial law, it was no longer possible to envision “socialism with a human face.” “What remains,” he wrote, “is communism with its teeth knocked out.”
Mass protests, like those of Solidarity in the 1980s, shook the regimes of Eastern Europe. But the roots of protest and dissent went back a decade or more in the region. As the economies and the regimes began to weaken in the 1970s, dissident groups became more active, visible, and popular. This was stimulated in part by the 1975 signing of the Helsinki Accords by the governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These documents, the result of a long process of negotiations among thirty-five states in Europe plus the United States and Canada, contained a whole section on “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief.”
After the agreements were signed by their governments, dissident intellectuals in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe formed human rights monitoring groups to publicize their governments’ violations of the human rights they had been guaranteed at Helsinki. Often, these were illegal underground publications (called samizdat in the Soviet Union), but some were published openly and defiantly, complete with the names and addresses of the signatories. In Czechoslovakia, for example, a group of intellectuals openly circulated a document entitled Charter 77, which called on people to speak out on behalf of human rights guaranteed by Czechoslovak laws and the Helsinki Accords. The playwright Václav Havel became the spokesman for Charter 77; a dozen years later, Havel became one of the leaders of the revolution that brought down the communist government of Czechoslovakia.
GORBACHEV AND PERESTROIKA
Probably these popular protests and dissident activities would have gotten nowhere had it not been for a change of leadership in the Soviet Union. In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died at the age of seventy-six after eighteen years as leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His next two successors, also elderly, died within a few years, and in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen Communist Party leader. At the age of fifty-four, Gorbachev was by far the youngest member of the Soviet leadership, the first party leader born after the Russian Revolution, and the first to begin his political career after the death of Stalin. He was also educated (with a law degree), articulate, and charismatic. Almost immediately, he began to push for a whole series of increasingly radical reforms, both economic and political.
The core of the reform program was what Gorbachev called perestroika, or “economic restructuring.” After years of rapid economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet economy had been growing at only about 2 percent annually for a decade. The rigid system of state control and central planning no longer functioned well in a complex and global economy. Internal problems were compounded in the 1980s by a sharp decline in world prices for petroleum, a major source of export earnings for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the long and costly Cold War arms race with the United States was an increasing drain on economic resources.
These economic problems had a deleterious effect on living standards in the USSR. Even the official press admitted that the Soviet Union ranked between fiftieth and sixtieth of the world’s countries in per capita consumption of goods and services. Gorbachev recognized that the legitimacy and stability of the Soviet regime (and other communist regimes) was increasingly dependent on economic success and consumer satisfaction and that a more efficient economy required commitment, hard work, and support from the population. As he himself put it, “A house can be put in order only by a person who feels he is the owner.”
Perestroika, then, involved making a number of liberalizing changes to the economic system without ever abandoning socialism. Central planning was scaled back, allowing more decision making at the factory level. Small-scale private and cooperative firms were allowed to operate independently of government planning. The government allowed some limited role for the free market in agriculture as well.
In his effort to revitalize the Soviet system, Gorbachev linked perestroika with glasnost, meaning “openness” or “publicity,” and meant to open Soviet society to a critical evaluation of its past and present problems. Censorship was relaxed, and previously taboo subjects began to receive coverage: joblessness, drug abuse, prostitution, crime, urban blight, homelessness, and so forth. The campaign for glasnost was accompanied by democratization of the political system, which included the introduction of multicandidate (although not multiparty) competition in elections, the sanctioning of independent groups and associations, improved relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, and a reduction in the dominating role of the Communist Party. These changes did not create Western style democracy in the Soviet Union, but they were steps in that direction. A final, critical element of Gorbachev’s reforms was “new thinking” in foreign policy. Here, too, the basis of change was economic. If Moscow wanted to develop an economy that was more efficient and more oriented toward consumer goods, it needed to expand trade, attract technology, reduce military spending, and cut back on aid to other countries. All of this required a more relaxed international atmosphere and, in particular, an improved relationship with the United States. So, within a few years, Gorbachev floated a number of major arms-control proposals, reduced Soviet defense spending, pulled back some troops stationed in Eastern Europe, and began to disengage from Afghanistan (where the Soviets had been fighting Islamic mujahidin since 1979).
As Soviet policies toward the rest of the world changed, so did the Kremlin’s orientation toward Eastern Europe, the region of primary economic, strategic, and ideological importance to Moscow. Hoping to make the Eastern European economies more efficient and less dependent on the Soviet Union, Gorbachev made a series of visits to the Eastern European capitals to prod those countries toward their own perestroika. He also subtly backed away from the principles of the Brezhnev Doctrine, stressing “the right of every people to choose the paths and forms of its own development.” All of this strengthened the hands of reformers in the region and led to increasing demands for change. This time, it seemed, Moscow would not block reform in Eastern Europe.
