The Penguin History of the World

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 soldiers and the KGB in Vilnius and Riga early in the New Year did not stem the tide. For by then, nine Russion 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 world looked on, bemused.

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. 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 Wałesa became president. A few months earlier, Hungary had elected a parliament from which emerged a non-Communist government. Soviet soldiers began to withdraw from the country. In June 1990, Czechoslovak 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.