Which Event Preceded the Revolutions of 1989

HANSI KRAUSS/AP

Lenin statue dismantled in Berlin, 1991

The end of the story was gruesome–a spray of bullets and a splattering of claret on a wall in fundamental Romania. On Christmas Day 1989, after a hastily arranged trial before a kangaroo court, the deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad. The assembled soldiers, eager to eliminate the despised dictator, were ordered not to aim higher than his chest. The faces of the condemned had to be recognizable after the fact. The country had to see that the communist era was over.

The fall of communism was as decisive a turning point in modern history as the French or Russian revolutions. In 1989 the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe collapsed; the partitioning of Europe symbolized by the Berlin Wall crumbled; the cold war began to recede into historical memory; and more pluralistic, sometimes democratic, states emerged where one-party dictatorships had dominated for iv decades. (It was likewise the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille.) Statist, ostensibly planned economies yielded to freewheeling capitalist markets; and hopes were raised, momentarily as it turned out, for a “new world guild” without debilitating ideological conflicts.

Interpretations of the causes of the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire are becoming equally numerous as books on the subject, particularly in this, its twentieth-anniversary year. At ane farthermost are fatalistic accounts that trace the demise of a utopian system structurally flawed at its conception. At the other are highly voluntarist and contingent explanations that focus on the key players–the Smoothen pope, John Paul II; the determined but inconsistent reformer Mikhail Gorbachev; and an array of actors on both sides of the barricades, from Lech Walesa to Nicolae Ceausescu–who shaped a welter of dynamic and volatile events without always beingness able to command them. But the events themselves were so consequential for our own times that few are content to terminate with narration, analysis and explanation. Moral and political lessons are to be learned. Judgments almost socialism, capitalism, commonwealth and the social engineering intrinsic to modernity are to be handed down.

The events of 1989 are most often depicted every bit the failure of socialism. It’s a powerful interpretation that has served to ignominy alternatives to the backer system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural social club, non least human nature. Capitalism, information technology is proposed, is the normal state of homo traffic in what people make and value and need; socialism is the deviation. Capitalism responds to the nature of “man”–acquisitiveness, competition, egoism and the insatiable need for more. Socialism stands in the way of initiative, creativity and contest. Going by its nom de guerre, communism, information technology proposes radical equality in a world of unequals. Therefore, it tin be maintained just by the coercive power of an entrenched elite and a repressive country. In the Eastern bloc, in one case that force was removed and party leaders lost conviction in their right to rule, communism naturally brutal, and people’s instinctual drives for material accumulation were liberated. Markets won out everywhere, even when democracy did not.

History, however, is e’er more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. The history of Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century can be told every bit the story of ii serial of revolutions: the communist-led revolutions of the post-World State of war 2 years that ousted the sometime ruling elites and transformed largely rural societies into urban industrial ones; and the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, more often than not peaceful and in one case even “velvet,” that overturned entrenched party regimes already weakened by political sclerosis. In Eastern Europe, 1 form of “actually existing socialism” was established at a particular historical moment–the beginning of the cold war struggle betwixt an enormously wealthy, nuclear-armed United States and a significantly weaker Soviet Union. 40 years later, communism fell when political crises, economic stagnation (simply not economic collapse) and a will to alter the way the arrangement worked coalesced at another historical moment. To the lasting dismay of democratic socialists in Europe and elsewhere, information technology was a moment of Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberalism, vigorous anticommunism and muscular military machine and covert operations against the left and radical movements in all parts of the globe. Every bit for socialism, what originated in the early nineteenth century as a noble political philosophy devoted to promoting the common practiced was reduced to an epithet hurled at anyone skeptical of the workings of laissez-faire or the idea that capitalism is intrinsic to the natural order. Socialism has a long history, but it has not been able to escape the crushing burden of its contempo Leninist incarnation.

The end of the story was besides confusing. How did two empires fall–1 in Eastern Europe, the other the Soviet Union itself–with niggling endeavour past the regal ability to forestall their disintegration? The upheaval and downfall occurred so chop-chop, then unexpectedly, that journalists could barely keep up with it and scholars were left disoriented. Twenty years on, in
Revolution 1989, journalist Victor Sebestyen offers an assay that foregrounds human actors and avoids larger conclusions near the structural factors that contributed to communism’s disintegration. Constantine Pleshakov, a historian at Mount Holyoke College, does not shy away from evoking the positive achievements of communist power in order to explain its durability, merely virtually of the story he tells in
At that place Is No Liberty Without Breadstuff!
is ultimately about the pour of events, from Poland to Afghanistan, that overwhelmed the creaky “socialist” system and its creaky operators. In
Uncivil Society, Stephen Kotkin and January Gross, historians at Princeton University, offer a deeply structuralist analysis of communism’south plummet. Their narrative combines a certainty about the unreformability of state socialism, at least in Eastern Europe, with a preachy confidence in the inevitable triumph of capitalism. For all their differences in tone, perspective and scope, these iii books are masterful and reliable accounts of a time when the world turned right side upwardly (no pun intended).

Similar the two earth wars that preceded information technology, the cold war began in Eastern Europe, a fragmented frontier between developed industrial capitalism and its agrarian poor relation, notwithstanding largely peasant, traditionally religious and fiercely nationalist. This was not a especially hospitable identify to launch a socialist revolution à la Marx–especially when that revolution was associated with Russia, the Bully Power most resented past Poles, Germans, Hungarians and Romanians. Stalin’s USSR was slowly recovering from its costly victory over fascism. It was suspicious of the intentions of its former allies and determined to retain the territorial spoils of the recently concluded war, stretching from its western borders to primal Germany. The “East European Revolutions” of the 1940s and ’50s were largely, though not entirely, imposed by the Kremlin, and the arrangement eventually congenital was modeled afterward the most draconian variant of what has been called socialism, namely the Stalinist command economic system and police state.

Realists in the East and West understood that given military conditions and Soviet notions of security, the question of whether capitalism or communism would dominate Eastern Europe was moot. The true question was not
if
but
how
Stalin would control the “liberated” countries. Would they become centrolineal simply autonomous states, similar Republic of finland, or fully Stalinized and Soviet-manipulated police regimes? At first the Soviets promoted coalition governments and gradual social transitions. The pre-war elites had been discredited by their collaboration with the Nazis, and the politics of well-nigh of Eastern Europe gravitated leftward. In Hungary, Poland and Romania, hundreds of thousands of acres of private holding were turned over to peasants. In Poland, industry endemic by Germans was nationalized. Russians were popular in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Republic of bulgaria, and the same social reforms easily gained support at that place. Merely four of the countries taken by the Soviet ground forces–Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria–had been office of the Axis, and they were drained of resources as reparations for the Soviet Marriage’s staggering war losses.

Every bit in the Soviet Union, communists in Eastern Europe were roughshod modernizers. Kremlin leaders believed that the security of the USSR went hand in manus with the transformation of the countries on its western edge from agrarian to industrial, peasant to proletarian. By the late 1940s whatever deviance from the strict Soviet form of “revolution from to a higher place” led to expulsion from the communist bloc (equally in the case of Tito’s Yugoslavia); the purging of dissenters; or fifty-fifty the execution of veteran political party leaders, including László Rajk in Hungary, Traicho Kostov in Republic of bulgaria and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia.

In
There Is No Freedom Without Bread!, Pleshakov introduces the metaphor of civil war to revise conventional accounts of 1989 in Eastern Europe. He argues that if socialism was every bit fundamentally flawed, and its fall as preordained, equally the fatalists say, it would not take lasted as long as it did. The regimes not just survived for forty years but were relatively stable and even enjoyed a degree of pop support, in large function because of what Pleshakov calls “social contracts betwixt the rulers and the ruled”: “No Communist state could accept done without secret constabulary–but people accepted the land non just because of terror and intimidation, but also because of free health care, free housing, and complimentary education.” Dissident Poles may have shouted in 1980, “At that place is no staff of life without liberty!” only Pleshakov claims that the contrary was also true. The communists not only expropriated land from the aristocracy and the church simply secularized education, provided jobs in new industries and made life and livelihood more secure and anticipated. Furthermore, they extended Poland territorially by annexing High german lands to compensate for the loss of the eastern role of pre-state of war Poland that Stalin incorporated into the Soviet Wedlock. They abetted the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteed the new borders of the state, as well as the independent existence of the Gdr (GDR). Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles were not happy with the loss of territory ceded to the USSR and Romania; but the presence of the Soviet Regular army, along with the internationalist rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism, at least prevented the recurrence of the worst excesses of indigenous nationalism that had long plagued the region. Economies grew in the years later on Stalin’south death in 1953; energy was cheap, subsidized by Soviet exports; and in general Eastern Europeans lived improve in the periphery of empire than almost Russians did in its metropole.

For those existing, as we say, “under communism,” Pleshakov argues, making a living came first and was for many years almost enough to brand the socialist experiment seem gratifying. Even after the “Soviet Union and its version of communism had lost luster,” he says, egalitarian Marxism, a more man form of communism without terror or Russians, continued to have broad entreatment. But the Kremlin’s determination to crush the anti-Stalinist uprisings of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia left those hopeful for another kind of socialism feeling bewildered, if not betrayed. What they got was “vegetarian” communism or (for the omnivores) “casserole communism”–more goods, some travel away, less repression, only simply the most muted voice in politics. By the early ’70s the regimes looked stable, relatively prosperous and likely to suffer. But the command economy by itself couldn’t uphold the social contract: Eastward Federal republic of germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania borrowed heavily from the West to maintain an crumbling industrial base and a standard of living comfortable enough to proceed populations relatively quiescent. The debt owed to strange banks swelled, and a cycle of falling productivity and growing discontent accelerated.

In retrospect, the second round of Eastern European revolutions appears to exist the culmination of four crucial events. The showtime two were the mass strikes of 1970 and 1976 in Poland, which forced the government to make concessions to popular protest and culminated in the formation of Solidarity, the officially recognized independent trade marriage, in 1980. Eventually Poland’s communists could no longer placate the burgeoning workers’ motion, and party chief Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski reacted past declaring a “war” in Dec 1981, arresting thousands, Walesa included, and driving Solidarity underground. The third upshot was the ballot, in 1978, of Karol Józef Wojtyla as Pope John Paul Ii. The Kremlin was appalled that a cleric from the Soviet bloc had been elevated to a position of global influence. The pope did not have any armored divisions at his control, but his moral authority at home and abroad translated into what Marxists understood to exist a “material strength.” Presently hundreds of thousands of civilians would be on the street or on strike, inspired by John Paul 2’s refusal to compromise with Marxism. Money from Us intelligence agencies, funneled secretly through Western labor organizations and the church, helped to fuel the movement. The fourth issue was the nearly unpredictable: the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev equally full general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’southward radical reforms turned, step by step, into a revolution that crippled the party and dissolved state authorization. His greatest gift to the USSR’s satellite states was to restore their sovereignty and pledge not to interfere in their diplomacy. To the dismay of hardliners like Erich Honecker in East Germany, the Soviets refused to back up former customer states facing popular protests.

With sharply drawn anecdotes, Victor Sebestyen relates in
Revolution 1989
what happened when a reluctant Gorbachev traveled to East Berlin in early on Oct 1989 to notice the fortieth ceremony of the Gdr. In his public remarks the Soviet leader pointedly turned to Honecker and warned, “Life punishes those who fall behind.” That evening, as the two party leaders watched what was billed every bit a celebratory torchlight parade, blue-shirted, cherry-red-scarved Communist Youth marched by the dignitaries’ podium pleading, “Gorby, aid us; Gorby, aid u.s.a..” The rot had penetrated so deeply that even the sons and daughters of the aristocracy were calling for radical reform. For two weeks the party and country apparatus floundered in the confront of demonstrators, but Gorbachev ordered the 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in Due east Deutschland to remain in their barracks. Meanwhile, in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, communists and opposition figures held roundtable discussions to negotiate free elections in those countries and eventually the transfer of power.

Less dramatic than crowds in the street just equally devastating was the accelerating payments crisis faced by the communist states that had been borrowing heavily from strange banks for decades. Afterwards they conspired to remove Honecker as party boss in mid-October, German Politburo members were shocked to acquire that the country was essentially broke. But when Egon Krenz, the new party boss and Honecker clone, went hat in manus to Moscow, Gorbachev brushed him off: “We are in no position to offer assist, non in the USSR’south present condition.” On November 9, 1989, an East German language political party spokesman answering a question from NBC’s Tom Brokaw virtually the new travel policy for E Germans mistakenly stated that it was at present possible for people to cross the border freely. (The spokesman had meant to say that the old visa restrictions were being lifted and that people could use for passes assuasive them to cantankerous.) Within hours, thousands gathered at the wall. They climbed over it, danced on top of it and began tearing it apart. For many in Russian federation, the sense of national security they had gained from the Soviet army’southward westward advances in 1945 was buried in the rubble.

To paraphrase that principal of revolution Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary state of affairs exists when society is no longer willing to be ruled in the erstwhile way and the ruling elites are no longer able to rule in the one-time way. While not all such situations finish in successful revolution, the outcomes in Eastern Europe were for the most office positive. What would soon be called “transitions to democracy” (and would after spawn a new subdiscipline of political scientific discipline–transitology!) were not uniformly democratic in procedure; but most of the transitions did result in the formation of states that were democratic in character (in contrast to nigh of the successor states created from the former Soviet Union). Three distinct patterns emerged: the roundtable negotiations between the communist ancien régime and the opposition (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia); coups d’état within the innermost communist circles (Eastward Germany, Bulgaria); and a revolution from beneath that forced regime insiders to unseat the leader (Romania). Efforts to preserve communist ability with truncheons or bullets failed in Leipzig, Prague and Timisoara, and ultimately the “dumpling-faced” party bosses lost the will and ability to rule in the old way. In Poland there was a progressive erosion of popular support and the simultaneous loss of confidence by the elite, a dynamic that spilled into Hungary, then Germany and Czechoslovakia, and finally Bulgaria and Romania. In
Uncivil Society, Kotkin and Gross liken the revolutions in the GDR and Romania to “banking company runs.” When the government wavered, masses of people took to the streets and withdrew their acquiescence to the organization. In Hungary and Poland, past dissimilarity, there were negotiated shifts of ability. Even the timetables differed from state to state. Equally scholar-announcer Timothy Garton Ash put information technology, “In Poland it took ten years; in East Frg ten weeks; in Czechoslovakia ten days.”

For the self-proclaimed “socialists” of the communist regimes, everything from the reforms of Gorbachev to the tearing down of the wall was show non of revolution but a counterrevolution bent on the abolition of socialism. In November 1989, the Czech politico Alexander Dubcek, the hero of 1968 who had championed “socialism with a human face,” spoke at a press briefing in Prague and proposed a reformed socialism. The man of the 60 minutes, playwright and dissident Václav Havel, interjected, “‘Socialism’ is a give-and-take that has lost its pregnant in our state.” For Havel, socialism was identified with the authorities that he and his supporters were seeking to overthrow. Dubcek had failed–as Gorbachev would two years later–to embrace how far the popular mood had shifted away from his shopworn ideals. At the very moment that Havel and Dubcek shared the microphones, it was announced that the entire communist leadership of Czechoslovakia had resigned, and all forms of socialism, from communist statism to Dubcek’southward Social Democracy, seemed to melt into the air.

Equally the drama of 1989 moved toward a denouement in Eastern Europe, in the USSR reform was rapidly mutating into revolution. Gorbachev’due south promotion of elected bodies–the Congress of People’s Deputies and, later, elected soviets–shifted ability from the Communist Political party to wide parliamentary institutions. Politics moved from the cloistered offices of high political party officials into the spotlight of unscripted televised debates. The Soviet Union lasted two more years before disintegrating into 15 dissever states, just by 1989 the communist organization of a single governing political party and a command economy all operating nether strict censorship had vanished. What had once been an ironclad freighter labeled “totalitarianism” was being replaced daily by a jerry-built ship at body of water, hardly seaworthy and already foundering in the turbulent waters of economic crisis.

Gorbachev called his project of perestroika (rebuilding) a “revolution,” even though he did not conceptualize the loss of ability past the party he headed. He probably intended to eliminate the communist system merely wanted neither the end of socialism, which he divers as a politics dependent on and requiring democracy, nor of the USSR. And he certainly did not anticipate the precipitous rejection of party rule in Eastern Europe. (As Stephen F. Cohen has pointed out in an essay on the reformability of the Soviet arrangement, the pessimists doubted the system could exist reformed, because information technology would cease to be the Soviet arrangement–a tautological statement. That, of course, was always the revolutionary potential of a radical reform from above.) Only after Gorbachev had successfully reformed the arrangement out of being and ready adrift the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the instance of decolonization became a powerful incentive, first to dissident nationalists in Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Republic of latvia and Lithuania, and later to communists in the not-Russian republics. Even the old communist Boris Yeltsin discovered the political advantages of nationalism: afterwards repeatedly defending the integrity of the Soviet Wedlock, in 1991 he conspired with the leaders of Republic of belarus and Ukraine to bring downwards the Soviet state, and Gorbachev with it.

In the final few years of Soviet power, Gorbachev was not only unwilling to use force to retain command of the Eastern European states but extremely reluctant to utilize compulsion confronting recalcitrant and rebellious Soviet citizens to hogtie them to obey existing laws and to prevent separatism. Violent suppression of demonstrations and protests and even pogroms occurred in Georgia, the Baltic republics and Azerbaijan, simply the use of the law or regular army was intermittent, hesitant and usually followed by concessions or apologies. Gorbachev, it turned out, did not take the “iron teeth” that Andrei Gromyko, in nominating him to the highest post in the country, had promised he possessed. Revolutions are most always accompanied by violence and often followed by ceremonious wars. Lenin unhesitatingly called for ceremonious war when he was struggling for power and used terror as a tool for land-building. Unlike some other state preserver, Abraham Lincoln, Gorbachev was reluctant to use the military and political instruments at mitt to proceed his union intact.

Kotkin and Gross contend against the cherished notion that an organized revolution from below occurred in Eastern Europe. They view Poland every bit an exception, but this caveat does not lead them to grant Poland the central role cast for information technology past Pleshakov and Sebestyen, who see the Smooth workers’ rebellion in 1980 as creating an existential dilemma for the Soviets. With the Soviet army engaged in Afghanistan, sending troops into Poland was unthinkable for Moscow. Since the Polish party could no longer rule in the former way, party principal General Jaruzelski was forced to declare a “state of war.” Poland was certainly unique, and co-ordinate to Kotkin and Gross, more than common was the process of “nonorganized mobilization,” most evident on those Dec days in Bucharest when a lone phonation was sufficient to turn a crowd confronting Ceausescu.

Mobilization confronting the state in Eastern Europe, they get on to debate, did non happen in or because of ceremonious society, that imagined community of anticommunist dissidents of the 1970s and ’80s: “Needless to say, in 1989 ‘civil society’ could not have shattered Soviet-style socialism for the elementary reason that civil lodge in Eastern Europe did not then actually be.” Dissidents a ceremonious guild do non make. Instead, “information technology was the establishment–the ‘uncivil social club’–that brought down its own system.” Totalitarianism, in Kotkin and Gross’south view, fabricated ceremonious social club impossible. That extra-state arena of “people taking responsibility for themselves” with “recourse to state institutions to defend associationism, civil liberties, and individual belongings” was a mirage. Poland’south Solidarity mesmerized Eastern Europe, merely in no other Soviet bloc country were citizens able to echo its successes. “Uncivil society” constituted a world of structural incompetence. The Soviet system itself, its practices of secrecy and compulsion, its civilisation of suspicion, promoted the loyal rather than the capable, the submissive rather than the innovative, the risk-averse rather than the creative. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell considering the elites were unable to alter their ways; Gorbachev refused to back up them and demanded that they reform. When the “uncivil society” of an illiberal state was no longer able to manipulate or even judge the mood of its own people, it found itself bereft of the most basic instruments of regime.

Kotkin and Gross provide an intriguing revision of the usual narrative of mobilized popular resistance to “actually existing socialism.” Highlighting the failures at the acme is key to understanding the collapse of communism, but that emphasis must be supplemented by attending to what went on below. Both organized popular resistance in Poland and more spontaneous mass mobilization in most of the other socialist states, as Pleshakov and Sebestyen extensively and persuasively demonstrate, contributed to the crises that made the communist regimes unsustainable.

Eastern European communists promised something besides social justice and equality; to their own detriment they too promised greater prosperity and productivity than was possible under capitalism. Khrushchev repeatedly spoke of “reaching and surpassing America!” This was yet another failure in the face of capitalism. The economies of Soviet bloc countries, themselves eager to incessantly increase output, were ultimately outperformed by the Due west. Nowhere was this dissimilarity more axiomatic than in Berlin, where the radiance of the western sector outshone the more subdued lights to the east. Not only were the Soviet-style economies unable to compete successfully but, by engaging with the bankers of the Westward, they became dependent on loans and saddled with onerous debt. The “social contract” trapped the socialist states; they could neither modify the subsidies that underwrote depression consumer prices nor apply the capitalist weapon of unemployment to restructure their economies. Prc’s “market place Leninism” showed i way out–a plow toward capitalism without democratization–merely Eastern European communists hesitated to take that path. Even Hungary, the about market-oriented, would not let labor or upper-case letter markets.

Communism, Kotkin and Gross conclude, was unredeemable. The execution, on Christmas Day, of the i remaining dictator in Eastern Europe was for them the salute that marked not only the collapse of the communist institution but the triumph of commercialism and the failure of socialism. Stripped of the hopes and illusions of earlier years, past 1989 many on the streets agreed with the Polish opposition effigy Adam Michnik: “At that place is no socialism with a man face, only totalitarianism with its teeth knocked out.”