The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 653Communist government initially felt strong and the
first demonstrations were met with force and arrests.
The Czech dissident movement had for a long time
drawn its leaders from the intelligentsia who had sup-
ported the Prague Spring in 1968, drafted Charter 77 in
1977, and then grouped themselves together under the
leadership of Vaclav Havel in the Civic Forum. After
Gorbachev visited Prague in October 1989, the Civic
Forum resumed the demonstrations, and this time they
were backed by a widespread strike of workers. The
Czechoslovak Communist Party initially agreed to sur-
render its monopoly on power and to include non-
Communists in the government, but the tempest of
perestroikacould not be contained with such limited con-
cessions. Negotiations with leaders of the Civic Forum
produced an agreement to abolish controls on the press
and TV, release political prisoners, and end the Marxist
control of universities. Demonstrations continued,
however, and within a few weeks, the Communist gov-
ernment resigned. The Parliament hurriedly adopted a
democratic system of government and scheduled elec-
tions; in the interim, it named Havel president of
Czechoslovakia. Havel negotiated the withdrawal of
the Soviet army and led Civic Forum to victory in the
first free elections in June 1990. Like all of the states
breaking away from their Communist past, Czechoslo-
vakia faced great problems, including one that was es-
pecially urgent: Slovakian leaders representing the
eastern portion of the country asked to separate a
Czech state (the western provinces of Bohemia and
Moravia) and a Slovak state.
Only in Romania did the revolution of 1989 result
in a bloody conflict. The struggle began in the Transyl-
vanian town of Timisoara, one of the centers of the
Hungarian minority population, which numbered
two million. A Hungarian Protestant clergyman in
Timisoara, Lazlo Tökés, had become a champion of re-
ligious and ethnic freedom there. In December 1989
the government of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu ordered
Tökés deported; when he refused to leave, an attempt
to arrest him precipitated a demonstration of ten thou-
sand people in Timisoara. The Romanian security po-
lice fired on the demonstrating crowds, killing several
hundred people. Romanians responded with anti-
Ceausescu demonstrations in Bucharest, and the Ro-
manian army refused to break them up. When
Ceaucescu declared martial law, units of the army
joined the demonstrators. Two weeks of fighting be-
tween the army and the security police, who remained
loyal to Ceausescu, killed an estimated ten thousand to
eighty thousand. Ceausescu was caught, given a two-
hour trial, and executed that same day.
The Breakup of the Soviet Union,
1989–91
Nationalist unrest in the USSR had become open in the
late 1980s. In the north, the Baltic states (Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania) began to challenge Moscow. In
1988 the Estonians amended their constitution to per-
mit a local veto of Soviet laws. When Gorbachev re-
jected this degree of autonomy, 60 percent of the entire
population of Estonia (a nation of only 1.5 million)
signed a petition demanding self-rule. In the south, the
neighboring Asian republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan
quarreled over territory and the treatment of each
other’s minority population. Only an old-fashioned in-
tervention by the Red Army in September 1988 pre-
vented open war.
The Soviet Union began to break up in 1989.
There were riots against the central government in
Georgia in April, the Lithuanian legislature voted for
independence in May, workers struck for local self-
government in the Ukraine in July, demonstrations in
all of the Baltic states called for independence in Au-
gust, and Azerbaijan delivered the first formal declara-
tion of independence in September. By the end of the
year, the Estonian government had adopted a Declara-
tion of Sovereignty, and the Lithuanian legislature had
disavowed their 1940 treaty of annexation and restored
their 1938 constitution, thereby abolishing the Com-
munist monopoly of power. In early 1990 all three
Baltic republics formally proclaimed their indepen-
dence. Once again, revolutionary events were racing
past Gorbachev’s ability to manage them. He tried to
block Baltic secession but a new Lithuanian president—
until recently a dissident professor of music—and a
Lithuanian army of fifteen hundred men refused to back
down. Gorbachev made a desperate attempt to stand
against the breakup of the Soviet Union by ordering an
army crackdown in the Baltic states. When the Red
Army fired on a protesting crowd in Lithuania, thirteen
people were killed; 100,000 then turned out in Moscow
to protest and Gorbachev was beaten by the openness
he had fostered. Lithuania was allowed to hold a refer-
endum in February 1991, and 91 percent of the elec-
torate backed independence. The trend became so
powerful that two months later a similar referendum
was held in Georgia (Stalin’s birthplace), and 90 per-
cent voted for independence. Before the year had
ended, fifteen of the Soviet republics had chosen self-
rule, including the Baltic states and the European re-
publics of Belarus (a state of predominantly White
Russian population located on the eastern border of