The Penguin History of the World

In August 1989 Wałesa announced that Solidarity would support a coalition government; the Communist diehards were told by Gorbachev to accept 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, for the second time in the century, the historic Republic of Poland had risen from the 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 under way.

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 Soviet 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, initially 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 expressions of popular feeling, but glasnost had also brought to the Soviet Union its first surveys of public opinion through polls. Some rough-and-ready judgments 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 supine and unprotesting Orthodox Church appeared to have retained more respect and authority than other institutions of the Marxist-Leninist ancien régime.

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.