This huge change in international relations cannot be disentangled from its many consequences for other nations. They have to be artificially separated to be narrated, but one could not have occurred without the other. At the end of 1980 there was little reason to believe that the peoples of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were about to see changes unmatched since the 1940s. What was already clear was that the European communist countries were finding it harder and harder to keep up even the modest growth rates they had attained. Comparison with the market economies of the non-communist world had become more and more unfavourable to them, although this did not appear to suggest any challenge to the verdicts of 1953, 1956 and 1968, or to Soviet power in eastern Europe. The carapace provided by the Warsaw Pact seemed still to be capable of containing the social and political change crystallized over thirty years (and more, if one counts the great unwilled changes of the Second World War and its aftermath).
At first sight, communist Europe had a striking uniformity. In each country the Party was supreme; careerists built their lives around it as, in earlier centuries, men on the make clustered about courts and patrons, or the Church. In each (and above all in the USSR itself) there was also an unspeakable and unexaminable past, which could not be mourned or deplored, whose weight hung over intellectual life and political discussion - so far as there was any - corrupting them. In the east European economies, investment in heavy industrial and capital goods had produced a surge of early growth (more vigorous in some than in others) and then an international system of trading arrangements with other communist countries, dominated by the USSR and rigidified by aspirations to central planning. It had also given rise to appalling environmental and public health problems, hidden as matters of state security. Increasingly and obviously, a growing thirst for consumer goods could not be met; commodities taken for granted in western Europe remained luxuries in the east European countries, cut off as they were from the advantages of international economic specialization. On the land, private ownership had been much reduced by the middle of the 1950s, usually to be replaced by a mixture of cooperatives and state farms, although within this broadly uniform picture different patterns had later emerged. In Poland, for instance, something like four-fifths of Polish farmland was eventually to return to private exploitation even under communist government. Output remained low, however; most east European countries could achieve agricultural yields only half to three-quarters those of the European Community. By the 1980s all of them, in varying degree, were economic invalids, with the possible exception only of the GDR. Even there, per capita GDP stood at only $9300 a year in 1988, against $19,500 in the Federal Republic. Other problems, too, were arising. Investment in infrastructure was falling and so was their share of world trade. Debts in hard currency were piling up. In Poland alone, real wages fell by a fifth in the 1980s.
What had come to be called the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ (after a speech that functionary had made in Warsaw in 1968) said that developments within eastern bloc countries might require - as in Czechoslovakia that year - direct Soviet intervention to safeguard the interests of the USSR and its allies against any attempts to turn socialist economies back towards capitalism. Yet Brezhnev had also been interested in pursuing detente and his doctrine reflected realism about possible dangers to international stability by breakaway developments in communist Europe. Such dangers could be limited by drawing clearer lines. Since then, internal change in western Europe, steadily growing more prosperous, and with memories of the late 1940s and the seeming possibility of subversion far behind them, had removed some grounds for East-West tension. By 1980, after revolutionary changes in Spain and Portugal, not a dictatorship survived west of the Trieste-Stettin line and democracy was everywhere triumphant. For thirty years, the only risings by industrial workers against their political masters had been in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia - all communist countries.
After 1970, and even more after the Helsinki agreement of 1975, as awareness of contrasts with western Europe grew in the eastern bloc, dissident groups emerged, survived and even strengthened their positions in spite of severe repression. Gradually, too, a few officials or economic specialists, and even some Party members, began to show signs of scepticism about the efficiency of detailed centralized planning and there was increasing discussion of the advantages of utilizing market mechanisms. The key to fundamental change, nevertheless, lay elsewhere. There was no reason to believe that it was possible in any of the Warsaw Pact countries if the Brezhnev doctrine held, and had the Soviet army standing behind it.
The first clear sign that this might not always be so came in the early 1980s, in Poland. The Polish nation had retained, to a remarkable degree, a collective integrity by following its priests and not its rulers. The Roman Catholic Church had an enduring hold on the affections and minds of most Poles as the embodiment of the nation, and was often to speak for them - all the more convincingly once a Polish pope had been enthroned. It did so on behalf of workers who protested in the 1970s against economic policy, condemning their ill treatment. This, together with the worsening of economic conditions, was the background to 1980, a year of crisis for Poland. A series of strikes then came to a head in an epic struggle in the Gdansk shipyard. From them emerged a new and spontaneously organized federation of trades unions, Solidarity. It added political demands to the economic goals of the strikers; among them, one for free and independent trades unions. Solidarity’s leader was a remarkable, often-imprisoned, electrical union leader, Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic, closely in touch with the Polish hierarchy. The shipyard gates were decorated with a picture of the Pope and open-air masses were held by the strikers.
As strikes spread, the world was surprised to see a shaken Polish government soon making historic concessions, crucially by recognizing Solidarity as an independent, self-governing trade union. Symbolically, regular broadcasting of the Catholic Mass on Sundays was also conceded. But disorder did not cease, and with the winter, the atmosphere of crisis deepened. Threats were heard from Poland’s neighbours of possible intervention; forty Soviet divisions were said to be ready in the GDR and on the Russian frontier. But the dog did not bark in the night; the Soviet army did not move and was not ordered by Brezhnev to do so, or by his successors in the turbulent years that followed. It was the first sign of changes in Moscow that were the necessary premise of what was to follow in eastern Europe in the next ten years.
In 1981, tension continued to rise, the economic situation worsened, but Walesa strove to avert provocation. On five occasions the Russian commander of the Warsaw Pact forces came to Warsaw. On the last, the radicals broke away from Walesa’s control and called for a general strike if emergency powers were taken by the government. On 13 December, martial law was imposed. There followed fierce repression and possibly hundreds of deaths. But the Polish military’s action also made Russian invasion unnecessary. Solidarity went underground, to begin seven years of struggle, during which it became more and more evident that the military government could neither prevent further economic deterioration, nor enlist the support of the ‘real’ Poland, the society alienated from communism, for the regime. A moral revolution was taking place. As one western observer put it, Poles began to behave ‘as if they lived in a free country’; clandestine organizations and publications, strikes and demonstrations, and continuing ecclesiastical condemnation of the regime sustained what was at times an atmosphere of civil war.
Although after a few months the government cautiously abandoned martial law, it still continued to deploy a varied repertoire of overt and undercover repression. Meanwhile, the economy declined further, western countries offered no help and little sympathy. Yet after 1985 changes in Moscow began to produce their effects. The climax came in 1989, for Poland her greatest year since 1945, as it was for other countries, too, thanks to her example. It opened with the regime’s acceptance that other political parties and organizations, including Solidarity, had to share in the political process. As a first step to true political pluralism, elections were held in June in which some seats were for the first time freely contested. Solidarity swept the board in them. Soon the new parliament denounced the German-Soviet agreement of August 1939, condemned the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and set up investigations into political murders committed since 1981.
In August 1989 Walesa announced that Solidarity would support a coalition government; the communist diehards were told by Gorbachev to attempt this (and some Soviet military units had already left the country). In September a coalition dominated by Solidarity and led by the first non-communist prime minister since 1945 took office as the government of Poland. Western economic aid was soon promised. By Christmas 1989 the Polish People’s Republic had passed from history and, once again, the historic Republic of Poland had risen from its grave. Even more important, Poland, it soon turned out, led eastern Europe to freedom. The importance of events there had quickly been grasped in other communist countries, whose leaders were much alarmed. In varying degree, all eastern Europe had been exposed to a new factor: an increasing flow of information about non-communist countries, above all through western television (which was especially easily received in the GDR). More freedom of movement, more access to foreign books and newspapers had imperceptibly advanced the process of criticism elsewhere as in Poland. In spite of some ludicrous attempts to go on controlling information (Romania still required that typewriters be registered with the state authorities), a change in consciousness was underway.
That appeared to be so in Moscow, too. Gorbachev had come to power during the early stages of these developments. Five years later, it was clear that his assumption of office had released revolutionary institutional change in the Soviet Union too, first as power was taken from the party, and then as the opportunities so provided were seized by newly emerging opposition forces, above all in republics of the Union, which began to claim greater or lesser degrees of autonomy. Before long, it began to look as if he might be undermining his own authority. Paradoxically, too, and alarmingly, the economic picture looked worse and worse. It became clear that a transition to a market economy, whether slow or rapid, was likely to impose far greater hardship on many - perhaps most - Soviet citizens than had been envisaged. By 1989 it was clear that the Soviet economy was out of control and running down. As ever in Russian history, modernization had been launched from the centre to flow out to the periphery through authoritarian structures. But that was precisely what could not now be relied upon to happen, first because of the resistance of the nomenklatura and the administration of the command economy, and then, at the end of the decade, because of the visibly and rapidly crumbling power of the centre.
By 1990 much more information was available to the rest of the world about the true state of the Soviet Union and its people’s attitudes than ever before. Not only were there now overt experiences of popular feeling, but glasnost had also brought to the Soviet Union its first surveys of public opinion through polls. Some rough-and-ready judgements could be made: the discrediting of the party and nomenklatura was profound, even if it had not by 1990 gone so far as in some other Warsaw Pact countries; more surprisingly, the long unprotesting Orthodox Church appeared to have retained more respect and authority than other institutions of the Marxist-Leninist ancien regime.
But it was clear that economic failure hung everywhere like a cloud over any liberalizing of political processes. Soviet citizens as well as foreign observers began to talk by 1989 of the possibility of civil war. The thawing of the iron grip of the past had revealed the power of nationalist and regional sentiment when excited by economic collapse and opportunity. After seventy years of efforts to make Soviet Man, the USSR was revealed to be a collection of peoples as distinct as ever from one another. Some of its fifteen republics (above all Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) were quick to show dissatisfaction with their lot. They were to lead the way to political change. Azerbaijan and Soviet Armenia posed problems that were complicated by the shadow of Islamic unrest that hung over the whole Union. To make matters worse, some believed there was a danger of a military coup; commanders who were as discontented by the Soviet failure in Afghanistan as some American soldiers had been by failure in Vietnam were talked about as potential Bonapartes.
The signs of disintegration multiplied, although Gorbachev succeeded in clinging to office and, indeed, in obtaining formal enhancements of his nominal powers. But this had the disadvantage of focusing responsibility for failure too. A declaration of the Lithuanian parliament that the annexation of 1939 was invalid led, after complicated negotiations, to Latvia and Estonia also claiming their independence, though in slightly different terms. Gorbachev did not seek to revoke the fact of secession, but won agreements that the Baltic republics should guarantee the continued existence of certain practical services to the USSR. This proved to be the beginning of the end for him. A period of increasingly rapid manoeuvring between reforming and conservative groups, allying himself first to one and then, to redress the balance, to the other, led by the end of 1990 to compromises that looked increasingly unworkable. Connivance at repressive action by the soldiers and KGB in Vilnius and Riga early in the New Year did not stem the tide. For by then, nine Soviet republics had already either declared they were sovereign or asserted a substantial degree of independence from the Union government. Some of them had made local languages official and some had transferred Soviet ministries and economic agencies to local control. The Russian republic - the most important - set out to run its own economy separately from that of the Union. The Ukrainian republic proposed to set up its own army. In March, elections led Gorbachev once more back to the path of reform and a search for a new Union treaty which could preserve some central role for the Soviet state.
The Polish example had growing prestige in other countries as they realized that an increasingly divided, even paralysed, USSR would not (perhaps could not) intervene to uphold its creatures in the communist party bureaucracies of the other Warsaw Pact countries. This shaped what happened in them after 1986. The Hungarians had moved almost as rapidly in economic liberalization as the Poles, even before overt political change, but their most important contribution to the dissolution of communist Europe came in August 1989. Germans from the GDR were then allowed to enter Hungary freely as tourists, although their purpose was known to be to present themselves as asylum-seekers to the embassy and consulates of the Federal Republic. When Hungary’s frontiers were completely opened in September (and Czechoslovakia followed suit) a flow became a flood. In three days 12,000 East Germans crossed from these countries to the west. The Soviet authorities remarked that this was ‘unusual’. For the GDR it was the beginning of the end. On the eve of a carefully planned and much-vaunted celebration of forty years’ ‘success’ as a socialist country, and during a visit by Gorbachev (who, to the dismay of the German communists, appeared to urge the East Germans to seize their chance), riot police had to battle with anti-government demonstrators on the streets of east Berlin. The government and party threw out their leader, but this was not enough. November opened with huge demonstrations in many cities against a regime whose corruption was becoming evident; on 9 November came the greatest symbolic act of all, the breaching of the Berlin Wall. The East German Politburo caved in and the demolition of the rest of the Wall followed.
More than anywhere else, events in the GDR showed that even in the most advanced communist countries there had been over the years a massive alienation of popular feeling from the regime. The year 1989 had brought it to a head. All over eastern Europe it was suddenly clear that communist governments had no legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects, who either rose against them or turned their backs and let them fall down. The institutional expression of this alienation was everywhere a demand for free elections, with opposition parties freely campaigning. The Poles had followed their own partially free elections, in which some seats were still reserved to supporters of the existing regime, with the preparation of a new constitution: in 1990, Lech Walesa became President. A few months earlier, Hungary had elected a parliament from which emerged a noncommunist government. Soviet soldiers began to withdraw from the country. In June 1990, Czechoslovakian elections produced a free government and it was soon agreed that the country was to be evacuated of Soviet forces by May 1991. In none of these elections did the former communist politicians get more than 16 per cent of the vote. Voting in Bulgaria was less decisive: there, the contest was won by communist party members turned reformers and calling themselves socialists.
In two countries events turned out differently. Romania underwent a violent revolution (ending in the killing of its former communist dictator) after a rising in December 1989, which revealed uncertainties about the way ahead and internal divisions ominously foreshadowing further strife. By June 1990 a government some believed still to be heavily influenced by former communists had turned on some of its former supporters, now critics, and crushed student protest with the aid of vigilante squads of miners at some cost in lives and in disapproval abroad. The GDR was the other country where events took a special turn. It was bound to be a special case because the question of political change was inescapably bound up with the question of German reunification. The breaching of the Wall revealed that not only was there no political will to support communism, there was no will to support the GDR either. A general election there in March 1990 gave a majority of seats (and 48 per cent of the vote) to a coalition dominated by the Christian Democrat Party - the ruling party of the Western German Federal Republic. Unity could no longer be in doubt, only the procedure and timetable remained to be settled.
In July the two Germanys joined in a monetary, economic and social union. In October they united politically, the former territories of the GDR becoming provinces of the Federal Republic. The change was momentous, but no serious alarm was openly expressed, even in Moscow, and Gorbachev’s acquiescence was his second great service to the German nation. Yet alarm in the USSR there must have been. The new Germany would be the greatest European power to the west. Russian power was now in eclipse as it had not been since 1918. The reward for Gorbachev was a treaty with the new Germany, promising economic help with Soviet modernization. It might also be said, by way of reassurance to those who remembered 1939-45, that the new German state was not just an older Reich revived. Germany was now shorn of the old East German lands (had, indeed, formally renounced them) and was not dominated by Prussia as both Bismarck’s empire and the Weimar Republic had been. More reassuring still (and of importance to west Europeans who felt misgivings), the Federal Republic was a federal and constitutional state seemingly assured of economic success, with nearly forty years’ experience of democratic politics to build on, and embedded in the structures of the EC and NATO. It was given the benefit of the doubt by west Europeans with long memories, at least for the time being.