In 1989, a wave of popular revolutions trans-
formed Eastern and central Europe. Communism
was swept away. The Soviet Union withdrew.
Only ten years earlier the Warsaw Pact and Soviet
domination of central and Eastern Europe had still
looked solid and unshakeable. There were difficul-
ties, of course. Romania was showing signs of
nationalist independence; its communist leader
Nicolae Ceaus ̧escu was much admired in the West,
which courted him assiduously much to its
later embarrassment. In Bulgaria, the German
Democratic Republic, Hungary and Czecho-
slovakia, the communist regimes had proved
durable, though the last two countries had to be
brought into conformity with tanks and guns. For
two generations now the people of Eastern
Europe had known nothing but communism, and
those aged forty-five years and older had known
only different forms of authoritarian rule before
the Iron Curtain descended. The communist lead-
erships had claimed that they had made great
social and economic advances; a golden future
beckoned; hardship and suffering were only tem-
porary, the means to greater virtue and prosperity.
One supposed virtue was that worker and
peasant solidarity had replaced destructive bour-
geois nationalism. The Soviet alliance, people
were told, guaranteed their protection from
German revanchism. This seemed to justify the
stationing of the Red Army in their countries.
Only the Romanians in 1958 succeeded in
ridding themselves of their unwelcome Sovietguests. But all the Eastern-bloc national forces
relied mainly on Soviet weapons. The economic
exploitation of the satellites, a feature of the
Stalinist post-war years, had long ceased. Indeed,
the Soviet Union was now subsidising the East
European economies in the 1980s to a significant
extent, at some sacrifice to itself. Oil and raw
materials were supplied at less than world prices.
The goods manufactured in Eastern Europe,
moreover, were of a design and quality that for
the most part were unsaleable anywhere else
but in the Soviet Union. Of course the USSR,
because of its sheer size, dominated trading rela-
tionships. It is also notoriously difficult to evalu-
ate the advantages and disadvantages of the
Soviet-led Council of Mutual Economic Assis-
tance (Comecon) on the basis of price calcula-
tions. And if the Eastern Europeans had not
found a ready market for their goods and had to
find a market in the West, would that not have
made them more competitive? In the end they
found themselves linked to a collapsing Soviet
economy and, when that link was cut, faced eco-
nomic collapse themselves. Little reliance can be
placed on the statistics of economic ‘progress’
published by the regimes, although they were
carefully analysed by economic experts in the
West. In any event, they show a precipitous fall
from the 1970s to the end of the 1980s.
What can be measured is the increasing indebt-
edness of Eastern Europe to the West. With the
reduction of East–West tension, loans had become(^1) Chapter 76
THE IRON CURTAIN DISINTEGRATES
THE DEATH OF COMMUNISM IN
EASTERN EUROPE