48 The fall of communism

At the end of the 1980s—suddenly and unexpectedly—hard-line communist regimes in eastern Europe, for long thought of as immutable and immovable, toppled like a house of cards, with barely a shot being fired. Even the Soviet Union, the one-time ruler of this empire of puppet states, found itself no longer able or willing to maintain itself as a single sovereign state, and crumbled into a patchwork of new countries.

These monumental transformations came about through a combination of external pressures and an internal appetite for change. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had been followed by an intensification of the Cold War, especially after Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981. Under the amiable surface, Reagan was a diehard Cold War warrior, characterizing the USSR as an “evil empire.” He was determined to put pressure on the Soviets, especially through an escalation of the arms race, which he knew the USA, with its economic and technological superiority, could win. Cruise missiles were deployed in western Europe, and an ambitious and hugely costly space-based missile defense system announced—the Strategic Defense Initiative, jokingly referred to as “Star Wars.”

Meanwhile, the inflexible Soviet command economy was creaking under the strain, unable to compete in terms of defense expenditure, or in any other sphere. The gerontocracy that had kept the USSR in a state of stagnation for decades was dying off, and in 1985 a dynamic younger man, Mikhail Gorbachev, became secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party. The reform-minded Gorbachev instituted two new policies: glasnost (“openness”), which allowed much greater freedom of expression, andperestroika(“restructuring”), which involved a radical overhaul of the political and economic system. Factories and collective farms were given far greater autonomy, and some degree of private enterprise was allowed. Free multi-party elections were held in 1989 for a new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, and in February 1990 the Communist Party renounced its monopoly on power.

“We must heed the impulses of the times. Those who delay are punished by life itself.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking in East Berlin, October 8, 1989

Upheavals in the east In June 1989 Gorbachev had announced that the USSR was no longer willing to intervene to “defend socialism” in its east European allies—the doctrine that had been used to justify military actions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 (see The Cold War). This gave the green light to reformers across eastern Europe. That same month, Poland held multi-party elections, and subsequently Solidarity (a party led by former shipyard worker Lech Walesa) joined a coalition government with the communists. In Hungary, as summer turned to autumn, the communists were overwhelmingly defeated in free elections, and mass demonstrations in East Germany brought about a change in the communist leadership, the opening of the Berlin Wall, and an irresistible drive for unification with capitalist West Germany, achieved the following year. Similar demonstrations—the so-called “Velvet Revolution”—took place in Czechoslovakia toward the close of the year, resulting in the formation of a coalition government including a former leading dissident, the playwright Václav Havel. The only violent revolution was that in Romania, where, following the bloody suppression of an uprising by the secret police, the army took power in December 1989 and executed the dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, and his wife. Change was slower in Bulgaria, but in 1990 free elections were held for the first time.

Ethnic and nationalist conflict

The relaxation of the iron grip of communist rule, which had treated nationalist aspirations as reactionary and dealt with them accordingly, led to the opening of a Pandora’s box in parts of the former Soviet empire. For example, in the Caucasus, Muslim separatists in Chechnya attempted to break away from the Russian Federation, which led to bloody military intervention and retaliatory acts of terrorism. In Europe itself, the break-up of the former communist state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s into a number of ethnically based republics led to a series of bitter wars and bouts of “ethnic cleansing,” in which brutal tactics—including wholesale massacres—were used to clear certain areas of their populations. Such methods were deployed by a number of different nationalist militias, most notoriously the Bosnian Serbs, who at Srebrenica in 1995 killed more than 7,000 Muslim men in cold blood—the worst such atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.

In the Soviet Union itself, Gorbachev’s policies failed to improve the economic situation, and indeed shortages of food and consumer goods actually increased. Although he had become the darling of the West, he was increasingly unpopular at home. Some preferred Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of the Russian Federation (the largest constituent of the USSR), who advocated a more rapid rate of reform. At the other end of the spectrum were hardliners in the Communist Party, who in August 1991 attempted a coup against Gorbachev. This collapsed after a couple of days, largely owing to popular outrage stage-managed by Yeltsin. Gorbachev was left as a lame duck, as was the Soviet Union itself. One by one the constituent national republics declared their independence, and on Christmas Day Gorbachev resigned. The Soviet Union formally dissolved itself on December 31, 1991.

The aftermath Economically, the countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union found themselves subjected to a rapid and unmoderated transition to unrestrained free-market capitalism, in which small numbers of often unscrupulous entrepreneurs made themselves extremely rich, while others found themselves much worse off. It was a traumatic experience for many, used to full employment, subsidized housing and the safety net of the socialist welfare state—to which, in the course of time, some began to look back with a measure of regret, a rosy-tinted view dubbed Ostalgie in Germany (punning on ost, “east,” and Nostalgie, “nostalgia”).

“We communists were the last empire.”

Milovan Djilas, former aide to the Yugoslav communist leader Josef Broz Tito, speaking in 1992

Gradually, most of the countries of eastern Europe achieved sufficient economic equilibrium and democratization for them to be admitted to the European Union. The Russian Federation has taken a different course: while embracing free-market capitalism, it has tended toward an increasingly autocratic style of government, and also attempted to reassert something of the old imperial power exercised during the eras of the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union. This has sometimes led to tensions with the West, but nothing compared to that which prevailed during the Cold War.

To some in the West, the fall of communism was “the end of history,” the final triumph of the values of Western liberal democracy. They had not reckoned with the emergence of an entirely new phenomenon, that of global Islamist terrorism, which sought the utter destruction of the West.

the condensed idea

The rapid disappearance of a dispensation that had prevailed since 1945