The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 649exceed Gorbachev’s control of it. A blunt-talking cham-
pion of reform, Boris Yeltsin, pushed him to go further,
faster. Yeltsin’s criticism of Gorbachev had led to his
dismissal as Moscow party head in 1987 and then to
Yeltsin’s resignation of his Politburo membership.
When Yeltsin called for a multiparty system of govern-
ment, more than ten thousand people turned out in the
streets of Moscow to support him. When Gorbachev
created a new congress and held the first free elections
in the history of the USSR in March 1989, Yeltsin, like
Andrei Sakharov, was one of the first deputies elected
to it. By early 1990 the Communist Party had lost its
control of the state, multiparty politics had been legal-
ized, and a Russian presidency created. The Gorbachev
revolution had gone beyond Gorbachev. He no longer
had a strong constituency of supporters inside the So-
viet Union. Ardent Communists began to detest him
for destroying Communism, but ardent reformers
wanted leaders who would go much further. Revolu-
tions often consume individuals who stand between the
extremes, and Gorbachev was now a centrist. On May
Day 1990 he was publicly booed by thousands of
demonstrators, chiefly hard-line Communists and
staunch Russian nationalists. Before the month was
over, Yeltsin was elected to the presidency instead of
Gorbachev.
The Revolutions of 1989
in Eastern Europe
The Gorbachev revolution in the USSR led directly to
the breakup of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe
and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. The
Warsaw Pact had been renewed only a few weeks be-
fore Gorbachev came to power in 1985. But four years
later, the revolutions of 1989 (see chronology 32.3)
ended the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and redrew
the map of Europe with few shots being fired (see
map 32.3). Two years later, the USSR itself dissolved
into more than a dozen republics.
The revolutions of 1989 began in Poland and Hun-
gary. The Solidarity movement, which had been strug-
gling with the Communist government of Poland for
nearly a decade, finally won legal recognition in Janu-
ary 1989. The union movement used that new status
and its vast popularity to press the government to ex-
tendperestroikain Poland by liberalizing the political
system. The government, whose only signals from
Moscow were to accept restructuring, capitulated to
Solidarity in a series of April meetings and agreed to
free elections for the upper house of Parliament. Lech
Walesa called those meetings “the beginning of the
road to democracy.” That agreement guaranteed the
Communist Party a large block of seats whatever the
outcome of the voting, but Polish voters gave Solidarity
a landslide victory (80 percent of the vote) in June- In the Sejm,the nonelected lower house of the
Polish Parliament, the agreement gave the Communist
Party 38 percent of the seats and Solidarity 35 percent.
The two houses would together elect the president of
Poland. The Polish elections of 1989–90 ended a gen-
eration of Communist government in Poland. Solidarity
candidates won 96 percent of the seats in the upper
house. In elections to the Sejm,many prominent Com-
munists who were unopposed still could not win the
50 percent of the vote needed for election. Lech
Walesa, the shipyard electrician and chief founder of
Solidarity, won the presidency of Poland in 1990 with
75 percent of the vote. The new government immedi-
ately launched plans for the difficult transition to a
market economy.
The Hungarian revolution of 1989, in contrast, be-
gan among reformers within the Communist Party. The
government announced in January that Hungarian pere-
stroikawould allow multiple political parties, and it
backed that announcement with a new constitution
ending the Communist Party’s monopoly of political
power. Communist reformers were so determined to
end the postwar regime that they abolished their party
in October 1989 and tried to reorganize themselves as
a socialist party in hopes of surviving free elections.
None of their decisions was more popular than the Jan-
uary 1990 Hungarian-Soviet agreement for the with-
drawal of all Soviet troops stationed on Hungarian soil.
None was a more powerful symbol than the June 1990
reopening of the Budapest Stock Exchange. But the
most momentous decision of Hungarian reformers
came in May 1989, when the government opened the
border between Austria and Hungary, demolishing for-
tifications and removing barbed wire. This breech in
the Iron Curtain allowed East Europeans free access to
Western Europe. Communist states slower to embrace
change now faced the prospect that thousands of their
citizens might flee to the West.
The most dramatic of the revolutions of 1989 oc-
curred in East Germany. The DDR remained a strict
Communist dictatorship under Erich Honecker, the ag-
ing leader who had supervised the construction of the