Transitions to Democracy and the Collapse of Communism 1177

Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev (1931— ), the leader of the Soviet
Union, had undertaken a dramatic series of reforms in the mid-1980s that
liberalized the economy and political life in the Communist state. His bold
moves encouraged further demands for reform and stimulated nationalist
movements in the Soviet Union s republics. The impact was soon felt in
Eastern Europe. As campaigns for liberalization revived in Poland and Hun­
gary, it became clear that the Soviet leadership would not intervene to crush
movements for reform, as Gorbachev indicated that he viewed reform in
Eastern Europe as desirable.
Throughout Eastern Europe, one Communist government after another
fell. These revolutions ranged from the ‘Velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia
to the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceau§escu in Romania, until there were
no Communist regimes left in Eastern Europe (although in Bulgaria, Roma­
nia, and Albania, former Communists retained power). Overall, the fall of
communism was achieved through a remarkably peaceful process of change.
However, in 1989, Yugoslavia began to break apart in a cacophony of ethnic
hatred generated by the very question that the polyglot states creation after
World War I could not resolve: the national question. In Bosnia, civil war
raged. The Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. The U.S. official George
Kennan’s prediction in 1947 that the Soviet system “bears within it the seeds
of its own decay” turned out to be correct.

Adulation of Mikhail Gorbachev in Stuttgart, West Germany, for his bold moves

toward reform and liberalization in the Soviet Union.