The Fall of Communism

1989
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, then 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 Stalin
With Stalin’s death in 1953, some control
relaxed 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.
The Prague Spring

Czechoslovakia 1968: A liberalizing Communist

Party leader named Alexander Dubček 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 Brezhnev
Doctrine
The Soviet leadership justified the
invasion by arguing that if socialism was
in jeopardy in any communist state,
then 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.
 Solidarność
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 Gdańsk (formerly the
German city of Danzig), a shipyard electrician
named Lech Wałęsa assumed leadership of the
strike committee, which represented and
coordinated strike activity at more than 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 Solidarność (Solidarity).
 Poland
Under pressure from the Kremlin in
December 1981, the Polish government
declared martial law, arrested Wałęsa and
the rest of the Solidarity leadership,
interned thousands of Solidarity activists,
and banned the union. This seemed to be
yet another affirmation of the Brezhnev
Doctrine. But in Poland the Soviet army
had not intervened directly, apparently
fearing massive Polish national resistance
to the use of Soviet troops. 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.
 Communism with its
teeth knocked out.
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.”
Helsinki Accords
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.”
 Gorbachev
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen
Communist Party leader. 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. 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
•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.
•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.
 Revolutions of
1989
•Revolutions in 1989 in Poland, Hungary, East
Germany and Czechoslovakia (Velvet
Revolution), Bulgaria and Romania (violent
revolution in Romania). Later Yugoslavia and
Soviet Union.
•East Germany disappeared on October 3,
1990, and was absorbed into a reunified
Germany less than a year after the collapse of
the Berlin Wall.
•The ease and rapidity of change was
breathtaking. Regimes that were considered
well entrenched and well protected simply
tumbled, one after another, into the “dustbin
of history” (a phrase Marx had used to
describe the fate of capitalist states).
 Economic
Changes
•The economic changes required a
fundamental transformation of each
country’s social and economic systems and
even a psychological reorientation for much
of the population. In many respects, these
changes turned out to be more wrenching
and traumatic than the relatively quick and
painless political revolutions.
•In both Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union, all countries experienced
sharp economic declines in the early years of
the transition, with plummeting output,
surges in unemployment, and skyrocketing
inflation.
 Capitalism in Post
Communist Countries
The dawn of capitalism, though, brought
with it the usual share of problems.
Unemployment, which had been nearly
nonexistent in the communist era, reached
near double-digit rates in many countries at
the end of the 1990s. The number of people
in the region living in poverty increased
tenfold between 1989 and 1996. Increases
in unemployment and poverty contributed
to worsening health indicators, especially in
the countries of the former Soviet Union,
where mortality and morbidity rates were
without peacetime precedent. There were
also big increases in inequality.
Post Communism

In many postcommunist countries in

the 1990s, large percentages of the
populations expressed the view (in
public opinion surveys) that they had
been better off in the communist era
than they were in the democratic one.
Nevertheless, most people in the
postcommunist states were glad to be
free of the restrictions and privations of
the communist era and welcomed the
return of “normal lives” and the chance
to rejoin Europe.
 Epilogue
Twenty years after the 1989 revolutions,
almost all the former communist states
had successfully navigated the path to
democratic politics and capitalist
economics. What had been Eastern
Europe was thoroughly heterogeneous,
with some people very wealthy and others
quite poor but not too different in that
respect from Western Europe.