Revolutions of 1989

9 Key excerpts on "Revolutions of 1989"

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  Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe

  • Costica Bradatan, Costica Bradatan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  michael bernhard THE Revolutions of 1989

  twenty years later

  A nniversaries are artificial constructs, but they nevertheless provide us with an opportunity to reflect on the momentous events of the past. Those of a hagiographical bent are apt to grasp onto one great leader to explain the end of the Cold War as the product of that person’s visionary leadership. In this discussion I will endeavor to limit my invocations of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, or Pope John Paul II as the motors of history. My task in this paper is to consider the meaning of the Revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe with the benefit of twenty years’ hindsight. I want to focus on their causes and their consequences. This reflection will be structured into several sections. I will begin with a theory of the causes of those momentous events that put an end to communist regimes in Europe. My perspective is that of a political scientist who takes development in a comparative and international context as a crucial motive force in history. But I do not want to omit those who actually engaged in struggle in the countries where the revolutions took place. This discussion of the causes of the revolution will conclude with a brief overview of the events of 1989. I will then address its consequences from three perspectives. First, it has importance in terms of how we understand the past. Second, as an event it had profound historical meaning on its own terms. And third, it has shaped our contemporary world, in particular the current international system.

  the causes of 1989

  The most important cause of the Revolutions of 1989 was the exhaustion of the Soviet model of economic development. Had their economic model succeeded, it is highly unlikely that we would have witnessed the demise of the system. And, on the face of it, this is confirmed by the continued viability of one-party states in places like China and Vietnam, which have managed to overcome the limits to growth that undid Soviet-type regimes in Europe.

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  Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition

  In the West 1560-1991

  • David Parker, David Parker(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 The anti-Communist revolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989 to 1991

  Robert V. Daniels

  The collapse of Communism and the nature of revolution

  Two unforgettable images bracket perceptions of the revolutionary fall of Communism: the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in Moscow to defy the hardline coup plotters of August 1991. Between and around these landmark events swirled a storm of defiance and rebellion that brought about one of the most spectacular developments of the twentieth century, when the old political order in the Soviet Union and its bloc of East European satellite countries came to an end. By many standards – the break in governmental continuity, the depth of change, the reversal in dominant public attitudes – this movement was one of the great revolutions of history, as its protagonists, including Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, believed. Yet there are peculiarities about this upheaval – the lack of violence in most places, the centrality of national independence, and the targeting of the Soviet system that was itself the product of revolution in 1917 – that raise the question whether it was a true revolution.

  It is important to understand what the Soviet and East European anti-Communist revolutions were actually contending against. ‘Communism’ is often construed as the revolutionary doctrine of Karl Marx, implemented in Russia by Vladimir Lenin to begin a seventy-year ‘utopian experiment’ that ultimately ‘failed’. In reality, the old regime preceding the Revolutions of 1989 to 1991 was no longer an experiment, but a post-revolutionary, imperialist dictatorship dressed up in the language of Marxist ideology.

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  Revolution And Transition In East-central Europe

  Second Edition

  • David Mason(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Eastern European Revolutions of 1989 fit many of these past revolutionary patterns. The natural history of these revolutions accord closely with those described by Brinton and others. The major difference was the accelerated time frame of the Eastern European events. Except in Poland, where the origins of the revolutionary movement date to 1980, the Revolutions of 1989 proceeded much more quickly than did past revolutions. As noted earlier, this was due both to the symbiotic nature of change in Eastern Europe, with each country building on the achievements of the other, and to the accelerating impact of the mass media, which allowed people all over the region to know almost immediately what was occurring elsewhere.

  In Eastern Europe, perhaps even more so than in previous revolutions, the revolutionary movements were able to win over key personnel within the political elite. In every country, there were reformist elements within the communist parties who supported substantial change, if not the total abandonment of one-party rule. As early as 1988 in Hungary, for example, the reformist wing of the communist party allied itself with the emerging forces for change. In 1989, as the revolutions progressed in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, hard-line party figures were replaced by increasingly more accommodating party leaders, who eventually were willing to negotiate with the opposition and concede free elections. As we have seen, this was partly a result of the loss of confidence and morale within the communist parties and the increasing inability of the old party elites to handle the challenge of change. In Skocpol’s terms, this was a breakdown of the governing apparatus, due in large measure to changes in the international situation, that is, a more progressive and tolerant leadership in Moscow.

  The benevolent neutrality of the party elites in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was a key factor in the Eastern European revolutions, and it deserves further discussion. Not only was this an important reason for the success of these revolutions, it was also a major reason for their nonviolence.

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  1989 as a Political World Event

  Democracy, Europe and the New International System in the Age of Globalization

  • Jacques Rupnik(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The post-1989 world can be examined through a triple transformation: the transition to democracy as the only source of legitimate government; the globalization of market economies as the path to prosperity and modernity; and the triumph of the West in the Cold War as the prelude to the reunification of Europe and the quest for a “new international order”. Now may indeed be the appropriate moment to examine the legacies of 1989 as, more than 20 years on, we can see the limits or the exhaustion of the three interrelated post-1989 cycles that have shaped the post-1989 world: (1) from the democratic élan of 1989 to democratic fatigue or crisis of democracy and the rise of authoritarian regimes; (2) from the unrestrained triumph of a globalized market economy promoted by the West to the international financial and economic crisis that since 2008 has shaken the very foundations of Western economic preeminence; and (3) from the hopes in the 1990s of a “Europe whole and free” and a “new international order” based on global governance to the reassertion of power politics, the relative decline of Europe and the West and the emergence of new threats and new powers known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). In short, it is the post-1989 world in crisis that is now being re-designed.

  Interpreting 1989

  Among the many labels assigned to 1989, “democratic revolution” remains in retrospect as the most fitting. Not because the revolution itself was democratic (that may sound like a contradiction in terms), but because its aim and its actual outcome was to bring about democratic change. Revolutions, as Raymond Aron has observed, are often presented as movements of liberation, but “the revolutions of the twentieth century seem rather to promote servitude or at least authoritarianism”. Those of 1989 were different precisely because their ethos and leading protagonists – who were as diverse as Václav Havel and Lech Walesa – rejected violence and represented, albeit briefly, the meeting of dissident movements with the democratic aspirations of the people.

  The “Autumn of the People” of 1989 could perhaps most adequately be compared to the “Spring of Nations” of 1848, because of the speed of its diffusion-effect across Europe and the way it combined democratic and national aspirations: “Wir sind dans Volk” (We are the people) chanted by the East German demonstrators in October 1989 became, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are one people). From democratization to German reunification, popular and national sovereignty combined to challenge the post-war European order.

  But was it really a revolution? Certainly, if we consider that it resulted in systemic political and economic change. However, the negotiated transfer of power between moderate elites of the old regime and the dissident movements has also been called a “velvet revolution” or a “refolution” (Timothy Garton-Ash), a combination of reformist, non-violent means and revolutionary ends. “Rapid, mass, forceful systemic transformation of a society’s principal institutions and organizations”, Negotiated Revolutions in the words of George Lawson. In retrospect, this change in revolutionary paradigm can indeed be considered as the major, original legacy of 1989: the possibility of the triumph of non-violent civic disobedience over dictatorships protected by walls and an occupation army. For Adam Roberts, civil resistance combining pressure from below with division at the top was “one factor in ending communist party rule in many countries in 1989–91 and hence in ending the Cold War. The world today has been shaped significantly by this mode of political action”.2

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  Themes in Modern European History since 1945

  • Rosemary Wakeman(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 The Central and Eastern European Revolution, 1989–2000

  Ivan T.Berend

  “Yugoslav Communism, separating itself from Moscow,” stated the legendary Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, “initiated the crisis of Soviet imperialism.” However, he added, “The wound which the Hungarian Revolution inflicted on Communism can never be completely healed… Hungary means the beginning of the end of Communism…”1 “The October Revolution in Poland,” declared an enthusiastic contemporary reporter, “was more lasting…[and] more deadly to Communism. Where the Hungarian revolt failed, the Polish half-succeeded.”2 The Polish Communist Party, maintained Norman Davies, “never gained the strength or the confidence to advance beyond the compromises.”3 These three perspectives provide some impression of the complexity involved in assessing the struggle that engulfed Eastern Europe in the years after the Second World War. This chapter will discuss the evolution of communism in Eastern Europe, the revolts that provoked its collapse, and the efforts to “return to Europe” as a framework for modernization and reform after the upheavals of 1989.

  Roots: revolutions, liberalization, crisis, and erosion, 1956–88

  The Stalinist regime and Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe introduced after the Second World War, in most cases, had no popular support and indeed generated a genuine, fundamental resistance. The first lethal blow was Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948. Tito alone openly rejected Soviet leadership and began organizing a socialist Balkan confederation—a potential rival to the Soviet Union. Stalin reacted furiously and attempted to remove Tito, but failed. The result was that Yugoslavia followed its own independent road. The “October Revolutions” in Poland and Hungary, in 1956 represented two further setbacks. A spontaneous worker’s uprising in Poznaæ and then its military suppression generated a deep political and moral dilemma among the Polish communist elite. They reacted by removing the Stalinist leadership and re-elected Wł adisł aw Gomuł ka, the purged and imprisoned “nationalist deviator,” as Secretary General of the party. It was an open and successful revolt against Soviet political intervention. The Hungarian revolution at the same moment turned into the only national, armed uprising and, albeit briefly, the only successful military struggle for independence against the Soviet Union. Under the momentary leadership of Imre Nagy, it led to the collapse of communism, a declaration of neutrality, and the reintroduction of a multiparty democracy.

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  Human Rights and Political Dissent in Central Europe

  Between the Helsinki Accords and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

  • Jakub Tyszkiewicz, Jakub Tyszkiewicz(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12   Revisiting the revolution of 1989

  The end of the communist rule in Romania

  Dragoş Petrescu

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003187646-13

  The regime change in Romania was the last in a line of six regime changes that took place in 1989 in East-Central Europe (ECE). The regime change in Romania was unexpected, brief, and violent, in contradistinction to the five regime changes which preceded it, as it unfolded during the second half of the month of December 1989 and resulted in over 1,100 dead and 3,300 wounded. The violent nature of the 1989 events in Romania should be stressed once again, in opposition to the nonviolent regime changes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. This particular aspect of what is generally known as the Romanian revolution of 1989 has been stressed by many scholars. As sociologist Daniel Chirot observes, nonviolence was the norm in the 1989 events in ECE: “1989 was amazingly conflict-free because the ruling elites did practically nothing to save communism.”1 As for Romania, historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote at the time that the 1989 events in that country did look like a revolution: “Nobody hesitated to call what happened in Romania a revolution. After all, it really looked like one: angry crowds on the streets, tanks, government buildings in flames, the dictator put up against a wall and shot.”2 One can go further and argue, together with J.F. Brown, that the December 1989 events in Romania added to that same year’s regime changes in ECE, the missing elements of “classic” revolutions, which includes violence, bloodshed, and tyrannicide.3

  This chapter is concerned with the causes of the Romanian communist regime’s violent collapse and argues that external factors were determinant in bringing down communist rule in that country. Furthermore, this chapter argues that dissident discourses and actions centered on the issue of human rights only had a limited impact on the final demise of the Romanian communist regime. Other issues related to the 1989 Romanian regime change such as its ambiguous and contested outcome, short-term consequences, or enduring legacy from a 30-year perspective are not addressed here due to the limits of this chapter.

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  Popular Protest in East Germany

  • Gareth Dale(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part III The revolution of 1989

  Passage contains an image

  7 The summer crisis

  At the beginning of 1989 the Soviet bloc was entering a major crisis, the course of which was not predictable any more than its eventual outcome was inevitable. A series of remarkable policy shifts in Hungary and Poland were underway. In January, non-Communist parties were legalised in Hungary. In February, Round Table talks began in Poland. In April, the Hungarian leadership resigned. In May, Budapest began to dismantle the fortifications on its border with Austria. In June, the Polish Communist Party relinquished its hold on power. All of these transformations met with the Kremlin’s approval, or at least toleration (although it did insist that in Poland Communists retain the defence and interior ministry portfolios). Soviet leaders and advisers knew that their room for manoeuvre was narrow. Intervention by Soviet forces, they feared, could light the touchpaper under Eastern Europe as a whole. Even if the ruling parties in Eastern Europe held to a conservative course, ‘a political eruption’ – or even an ‘acute social-political conflict with an unfathomable outcome’ – could ensue.1 Further reforms, it seemed, were inevitable; the hopes (and assumptions) in Moscow were simply that these would be controlled by reform Communists or other pro-Soviet forces. The Kremlin’s approach was cemented in July with Gorbachev’s formal repudiation of the Brezhnev doctrine.

  In East Berlin a stiff silence was maintained throughout these months, punctuated by formal declamations of the unity of the socialist bloc. Behind the scenes, however, severe annoyance was expressed at what an incensed Honecker described as Hungary’s ‘slide into the bourgeois camp’.2 The reforms in that country and in Poland, he warned, represented ‘the visibly accelerating erosion of socialist power, achievements, and values’.3 In meetings with their Soviet-bloc counterparts, he and Stasi chief Mielke expressed ‘profound concern’ at these developments. At one point Mielke even hinted that co-operation with the KGB would be in jeopardy if Soviet foreign policy continued on its ‘tactless’ course.4

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  Cold War

  An International History

  • Carole K. Fink(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although the year 1989 marked the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, there was little radical spirit either in Europe or the rest of the world. The excesses of Lenin and Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, as well as of the Khomeini regime, had discredited the mass uprising as a means of achieving political democracy and social justice. The twentieth century’s major revolutions, co-opted by ruthless revolutionary cliques, had led to the terror, dictatorship, and human rights nightmares recounted by Solzhenitsyn and many others.

  Left-wing ideology had also been weakened in the 1980s by the ascendancy of neoliberal political and economic regimes in the West and the spectacular success of capitalist experiments in the developing world (particularly in Asia), as well as by Gorbachev’s attempt to reform communism by introducing market forces in the Soviet Union. Filling the ideological gap left by orthodox Marxism were two old and powerful world views. One was religion, represented by the militant Islam of Iran but also by the fervent Christian doctrine of Pope John Paul II, the charismatic Polish leader who visited 129 countries during his pontificate championing anticommunism and human rights. The second was nationalism, long suppressed by communists, which the peoples of the Soviet republics and of Eastern Europe now viewed as an agent of progressive historical development. In the 1980s even the orthodox East German leadership, attempting to win popular support, honored Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and the socialists’ old nemesis Otto von Bismarck as national heroes.

  Yet there was scant indication that 1989 would witness a stunning transformation on the very site where the Cold War began. On January 15 thousands gathered peacefully in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to mark the 20th anniversary of the student Jan Palach’s self-immolation to protest the Soviet invasion and occupation, some shouting “Gorbachev” to rebuke the Czech leadership’s refusal to institute reforms. Nervous party leaders ordered a brutal police crackdown using riot sticks, dogs, and water cannons, and almost 900 protesters were arrested. Although outgoing Secretary of State George Shultz denounced this violation of the Helsinki Accords, the incoming Bush administration was unprepared to challenge Soviet control over Eastern Europe.

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  Revolutions

  A Worldwide Introduction to Political and Social Change

  • Stephen K. Sanderson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Six Revolutions from Above in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union A FTER THE R USSIAN R EVOLUTION, the newly formed Soviet Union became the world’s first socialist society. Then, after World War II, it invaded several Eastern European societies and brought them under its political and military control as parts of an expanded Soviet Empire. Yugoslavia experienced an internal revolution in 1945, and also became socialist. In all of these societies, the economy became nationalized and subject to state control. Capitalist production for profit was officially abolished, and the existing capitalist classes were eliminated from the scene. Marxism-Leninism—or, more accurately, Leninism—became the form of government and the official political ideology. The Communist Party became not just the ruling party but the only party. Yet in 1989 and after, Communism collapsed as revolutions occurred in all of these societies. Table 6.1 lists the major state socialist (Leninist) societies and their current status. Today these societies are most commonly called postsocialist or post-Communist societies. They are in a state of transition from the old state socialist economies and Leninist governments to essentially capitalist societies with more open or democratic modes of government. In this chapter I describe the nature of these revolutions and consider what happened in these societies to produce them

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